Jim Harrison: Complete Poems

Harrison (Legends of the Fall) will always be better known as a fiction writer than a poet, but the sheer scale of this massive collection (over 900 pages) gives ample testimony to his lifelong dedication to poetry. Harrison belonged to the honorable American tradition of tale-teller rather than intellectual laborer; his poems, while they don’t spin the narratives his novels and novellas do, share with them a deep grounding in landscape and geography. Harrison did not quite have the flawless ear of his hero James Wright, and his lines move along with a certain prosiness, but he had wit and feeling, plus a good eye: in “Reading Calasso,” he writes, “I’m the pet dog of a family of gods / Who never gave me any training.” Certain themes persist: the fascination of the natural world and an awareness of human life’s troubles and limits, the latter colored at times by Harrison’s Zen practice. In a collection that spans decades of living and writing, there are poems of every character, many of them superb.