Rating: 
Summary: Unbelievable.... imagine hugging a bear.
Review: Jim Harrison has stretched out his arms and hugged a bear, I know he has. His poem "My Friend the Bear" has been running through my head since I first read it 3 years ago. This is one of many poems describing the flora and fauna of michigan and driving home the delicate nature of our interaction with it. Picture Jim cheek to cheek with a bear... if you have read him and met him you will know it is possible.
Rating: 
Summary: "This book...means the most to me." --Jim Harrison
Review: Jim Harrison is best known for his fiction (Legends of the Fall; Dalva), but he has published more poetry collections than novels. Since all but two of these poetry volumes have quietly slipped out of print, The Shape of the Journey allows readers the long-overdue opportunity to confirm Harrison's rightful place among the finest poets writing today.Included is an introduction by Harrison, several previously uncollected poems, an index to first lines, and "Geo-Bestiary," a new thirty-four part suite rooted in Harrison's legendary passions for food, sex. poetry, and the natural world. Concerning Harrison's work, The New York Times wrote: "This is poetry worth loving, hating, and fighting over." Publishers Weekly noted that Harrison's poetry was the work of an "untrammeled renegade genius...Here's a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language." Booklist gave The Shape of the Journey a starred and boxed review, and stated: "Harrison is most readily identified with his fiction, including the 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 collection, 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."
Rating: 
Summary: Browsable, rather than readable.
Review: Jim Harrison, The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon, 1998) Jim Harrison is a good poet. He's been below the radar for many, many years, writing poems about nature and drinking and general irascibility that few people have actually read. Which is a shame, because when he's really on his game, his work is comparable to that of the best nature poets working today (Hayden Carruth being the obvious parallel here). And more often than not, he is on his game in this book. Its major flaw is not the quality of the work therein, but the quantity. Even Bukowski, the most readable poet on the planet in the twentieth century, knew that stopping at about three hundred fifty pages of work was a good idea. Harrison's doughty tome weighs in at over four hundred fifty, and his stuff is not nearly as readable as Bukowski's. Nor is it as short. Even Carruth, whose Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991 (also released by Copper Canyon) is one of the few books that is the exception to this rule (over seven hundred pages, and every one a gem), took all the long poems and placed them in a separate, smaller volume. Harrison, on the other hand, mixes with glee. You get a ten-line ghazal on one page, then a thirty-page longpoem following. The effect is somewhat jarring at times. It's worth reading, but be prepared to linger over it for months, perhaps years. There's too much going on here to just take it out of the library. ***
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