From Publishers Weekly
Known for his fiction (Legends of the Fall; The Road Home; Wolf) and for his essays (Just Before Dark), Harrison has also been a prolific, ambitious poet. This expansive "new & collected" volume restores to print all his verse, from the lyrics and protest-poems of Plainsong (1965), through the effusive Letters to Yesenin (1973), the Zen-inspired After Ikkyu (1996), and the new miscellany of nature-verse and prose-poems Harrison calls "Geo-Bestiary." Harrison's works share a self-confident ease, a desire for simple lyricism and an unbuttoned, slouching, at-home feel; he conceives of poems as hikes, rambles, tours of his mind and his lands: "walking to Savage's Lake where I ate my bread/ and cheese, drank cool lake water and slept for a while." (The landscapes are often those of Northern Michigan, where Harrison lives.) In a sheaf of ghazals from 1971, Harrison's lyricism turns brilliantly campy, with distichs leaping and leaping like cats: "Yes yes yes it was the year of the tall ships/ and the sea owned more and larger fish." Later poems, reminiscent by turns of Gary Snyder, Robert Bly and Raymond Carver, specialize in diaristic noticing?of trees, of drinking, of sex ("She offers a flex of butt, belly button, breasts")?or else in quotable wisdom: "Even our hearts don't beat/ the way we want them to." But even these retain saving moments of flannel-clad, pine-forest camp: "I have to kill the rooster tomorrow. He's being an asshole,/ having seriously wounded one of our two hens with his insistent banging."
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Harrison is most readily identified with his fiction, including
Legends of the Fall,
Wolf, and, just out,
The Road Home , but, as he explains in the striking introduction to this superb collection, it is his poetry that means the most to him. He equates writing poetry with creating cave paintings or petroglyphs, so intrinsically human is the urge to express the life of the soul, and his poems do make the temporal timeless. Beginning with spare and lovely poems from
Plain Song (1965), Harrison offers the best of seven subsequent collections, including the heart-revving howl of
Letters to Yesenin (1973) and the Zen-influenced
After Ikkyu (1996), followed by a set of new poems that go off, like fireworks, with a bang followed by a radiant bloom. A man temperamentally unsuited to cities and academia, Harrison is drawn to the endlessly enlightening beauty of nature and sustained by the awareness of mind kindled by the practices of writing, Zen Buddhism, and walking the earth. Readers can wander the woods of this collection for a lifetime and still be amazed at what they find.
Donna Seaman
