Saving Daylight

by Jim Harrison

Named to the Notable Books of the Year lists from The Kansas City Star and the Michigan Library Association. “Jim Harrison is a writer with immortality in him.”— The Times (London) “This is [Harrison’s] most robust, sure-footed, and blood-raising poetry collection to date.”— Booklist Jim Harrison—one of America’s most beloved writers—calls his poetry “the true bones of my life.” Although he is best known as a fiction writer, it is as a poet that Publishers Weekly famously called him an “untrammeled renegade genius.” Saving Daylight , Harrison’s tenth collection of poetry, is his first book of new poems in a decade. All of Harrison’s abundant passions for life are poured into suites, prose poems, letter-poems, and even lyrics for a mariachi band. The subjects and concerns are wide-ranging—from the heart-rending “Livingston Suite,” where a boy drowns in the local river and the body is discovered by the poet’s wife—to some of the most harrowing political poems of Harrison’s career. There is also a cast of creature characters—bears, dogs, birds, fish—as well as the woodlands, thickets, and occasional cities of Arizona, Montana, Michigan, France, and Mexico. “Imagination is my only possession,” Harrison once said. And Saving Daylight is an imagination in full, exuberant bloom. Jim Harrison is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. His work has been translated into dozens of languages. Born and raised in Michigan, he now lives in Montana and Arizona.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Literature

124 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Jim Harrison was born in Grayling, Michigan, to Winfield Sprague Harrison, a county agricultural agent, and Norma Olivia (Wahlgren) Harrison, both avid readers. He married Linda King in 1959 with whom he has two daughters.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

His awards include National Academy of Arts grants (1967, 68, 69), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1969-70), the Spirit of the West Award from the Mountain & Plains Booksellers Association, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007).

Much of Harrison's writing depicts sparsely populated regions of North America with many stories set in places such as Nebraska's Sand Hills, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Montana's mountains, and along the Arizona-Mexico border.

Reviews

[Sharon]

I love this guy. He's me with different plumbing.

[James]

I am a huge fan of Jim Harrison's poetry and prose. I don't think this is his strongest book of poetry, but it's still enormously satisfying. It touches on the usual Harrison themes - nature, dogs, women, lust, human idiocy, war, aging. A couple of the poems are published in both Spanish and English and one poem is a translation of Neruda. The title poem, in particular, struck me this week as we move our clocks forward amidst ignorance. It is poetry of the hard-lived, the rough and tumble, and the appreciative and the savagely honest.

[M. Sarki]

Brilliant. Harrison getting better with age. My complete review can be read here:

https://msarki.substack.com/publish/p...

[Jane]

What can I say? I've fallen in love with Jim Harrison's poetry in recent years... the originality of image, the clarity of feeling, the strength of actual life sensibility. Extra tip: I also adore the food writing he's been publishing in Brick. It keeps leaving me agog, each time I read one of these essays. Appetite for larger life runs through everything Harrison does.

[Barbara]

Some of these poems are lovely, stirring, occasionally funny, and some I didn't like so much. But, the pearls kept me going. One of my favorites was entitled Water:

Before I was born I was water.
I thought of this sitting on a blue
chair surrounded by pink, red, white
hollyhocks in the yard in front
of my green studio. There are conclusions
to be drawn but I can't do it anymore.
Born man, child man, singing man,
dancing man, loving man, old man,
dying man. This is a round river
and we are her fish who become water.

[Luigi Sposato]

Jim Harrison is just special. Saving Daylight is a collection of poems that punch you in the gut while patting you on the back.

Masterful and brilliant. I don’t know how much better than this it can get.

[Chrissy Rongnion]

Finished by the river watching my beloved fly fish. Perfection. Wish you were still here, Jim. St Regis, MT

[Renny]

That time is fleeting, life is short, and that Jim Harrison may be America's greatest living poet!

[Robin]

Walking before daylight along the river with the dogs of memory, Jim Harrison
take us through his life in Montana and on the Mexican border--wonderful to be able to
accompany him.

[atito]

i don't know what to do with this one, honestly. it's pitch perfect in two- or three-line bursts: "This is the language / of the departed ones. Those who have become / birds seem happy to be no longer us." but then it inevitably turns to his god-given right to enjoy ass or to some other bullshit like "of late, politicians remind me of teen prostitutes / the way they sell their asses cheap" (?) or "God e-mailed me that sex would be better / in Spanish." pack it up delicious

[Tara Makhmali]

My favorite poem from this collection is “An Old Man.”

[Mike Dennisuk]

There is something raw and real about the poetry of Jim Harrison. He speaks with a midwestern voice about the joys and ravages of life. The indulgences and disasters. A joy to read!

[Joe Sundermeyer]

I love every damn thing that Jim Harrison wrote.

[Shawn Aebi]

Gritty, nostalgic, and often entertaining as sitting next to a wise old sage can be. Filled with reflections and memorials to a simpler time.

[Bobby Vanecko]

Jim's really one of the best ever

[Timothy Hoiland]

“There are a lot of muted grays in life,
dull bronzes, mornings the color
of a lead sinker that will never help
you catch a fish, and then a trace
of sun allows you to see down into the water
where three minnows pass diagonally above
a sunken log, two tadpoles, the pebble-
circular swirl of a spawning bed, a glutinous
clot of frog eggs, and farther out
a turtle peering above a lily pad’s edge. . . .”

[Mark]

I quite enjoyed several of the poems in this book, including this one:

Portal, Arizona


I've been apart too long
from this life we have.
They deep-fry pork chops locally.
I've never had them that way.
In the canyon at dawn the Cooper's hawk
rose from her nest. Lion's pug marks
a few miles up where the canyon narrowed
and one rock had an eye with sky beyond.
A geezer told me Nabokov wrote here
while his beloved Vera tortured the piano.
He chased butterflies to the pinheaded doom
but Lolita survived. What beauty
can I imagine beyond these vast rock walls
with caves sculpted by wind where perhaps
Geronimo slept quite innocent of television
and when his three-year-old son died
made a war these ravens still talk about.

Jim Harrison, c2006

[Sherry (sethurner)]

I had read Harrison as the writer of Legends of the Fall and various short stories. This was the first book of his poetry I read, and it felt to me like bits and pieces of intense journal writing. He writes about the places he loves (Michigan, Montana, Mexico, France), dogs he has adored, women he has romanced, people who have died, and the way he is aging. There is a real sense of anger at our goverment and how politicians send young people off to war. All in all, there is a lot to think about in this book of poems.

[Greg]

I love to read poetry, especially my kid's poems as they pass through childhood. Jim Harrison is a prolific poet who captures in a raw, unique style the beauty of the American West and Montana - where I live. He writes in a free verse style, without rhyme or reason - that challenges conventional logic, and a style that keeps one captivated. His poems are as rough as a hard-core Montana cowboy's life, but yet with a prose that lingers on long after the book is put down! A refreshing break from the usual non-fiction that I read.

[Donna]

I usually like Jim Harrison's work and some of the poems in the collection were reasonably good. However, the book itself was poorly organized and seemed to be merely a bunch of poems put together in a random order. The long, rambling poems in the middle were really difficult to get into. Too many repetitive themes with death, dogs, and birds.

For someone who counts Braided Creek among their very favorite poetry books, this work was disappointing.

[Edmund Davis-Quinn]

It took me a while to get through while I meandered through a lot of books especially Ellen Hopkins but glad I finally finished it.

"Memorial Day" and "Livingston Suite" are fantastic. It's been so long reading this I forgot Livingston Suite was part of this collection.

I wish librarians carried more poetry and move people read it.

[Stephen]

Harrison, a prolic, versatile writer. He's always considered his poetry to be his strongest work. He's right.

[Diane]

I like his poetry better than his fiction, but he's an all-around good writer. His memoir is fascinating.

[Cat]

It flows well

[Kim]

very good poet, very beautiful imagery

[Pierrick]

Poèmes dans la grande tradition américaine, mais avec une touche de simplicité propre à Harrison et qu'on retrouve dans ses romans
s

[Mills College Library]

811.6 H3197s 2006

[Dorothy Mahoney]

'Picked this up because he is a friend of Ted Kooser, and decided to read it slowly, one poem per day. 'Got lost in the length of some of the poems...

[Stephanie Maher]

Anyone who is good friends with Ted Kooser, is a good friend of mine.