The Essential Poems of Jim Harrison

Dean Kuipers reads Jim Harrison's posthumous collection, Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems (Copper Canyon, this month), sharing his thinking at Lit Hub. "He lived and breathed an American confrontation with the physical earth, married himself to a universe of bodies and stumps and birds, did not try to shuck his grotesque masculinity and stared hard with his one good eye ... at the inescapable, beckoning finger of death," writes Kuipers. More:

These poems are arguments and conversations that America should be having with itself right now: what have we done to the earth? What does it mean to be a human being now? The challenge of these poems is dizzying because they condemn us even as they feel beautiful in your mouth. Harrison wrote in the voice of a man who’d walked off his family farm in the cold northern climes of Michigan, with its profusions of life, and dared to wonder aloud what there was to live for. Dared even further to declare that maybe the stars, or success, or family weren’t enough. And then went on living.

A few lovers
sweep by the inner eye, but is mostly a placid
lake at dawn, mist rising, a solitary loon
call, and staring into the still, opaque water.
We’ll know as children again all that we are
destined to know, that the water is cold
and deep, and the sun penetrates only so far.

–from “Death Again,” from Songs of Unreason, 2011

Harrison wrote free verse, but now again harnessed himself to a form, as with his spectacular book of ghazals, an Arabic and primarily Persian style. A lapsed Calvinist, he thrived under a bit of discipline...

Read on at Lit Hub.