In Search of Small Gods

by Jim Harrison

Harrison, one of America's most celebrated writers, is considered "a renegade genius" for his poetry.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Nature, Literature, Adult

120 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 2009

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

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Home

If my body is my home
what is this house full of blood
within my skin? I can't leave it
for a moment but finally will. It knows
up and down, sideways, the texture
of the future and remnants of the past.
It accepts moods as law no matter
how furtively they slip in and out
of consciousness. It accepts dreams as law
of a different sort as if they came from
a body well hidden within his own.
He says, "Pull yourself together," but he
already is. An old voice says, "Stay close to home."

[Moriah Pearson · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I tell them that this is a world where falling is best." - Jim Harrison, from New World

This book is almost always in my purse, what more is there to say?

I have a friend who describes poetry and short prose like Harrison's as so: "If you ain't over 30, you ain't gonna like it." That's mostly because it isn't about tinder, text messaging, or how you are a beautiful phoenix; it also isn't about the newest pop album or something that will remind you of how much your ex-boyfriend sucked.

But I'm 25 and I keep it in my purse.

Did I say that I keep it in my purse yet? Harrison's metaphor and subject matter both are very often plucked right from the nature he keeps to and placed to page. He has an affinity for birds and dogs and has developed an impeccable skill in making the heart ache. I think a better description for his work is: "If you ain't human, you ain't gonna like it."

Like I said, I almost always keep it in my purse.

[Nate H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome collection.

[Clare Price · Rating 4 out of 5]

lovely collection of poetry. I read most twice in a row :) looking forward to coming across a hard copy one day and keeping it close- this is overall an exploration of where we (or at least harrison) often sees/finds/experiences "god". The places Jim Harrison does, I often do too.

[Tim Weed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this compulsively, which is unheard of for me, with poetry. I'd almost forgotten how much I love Jim Harrison's eye and mind. Well, I've read most of the fiction so now I need to read the rest of the poetry.

[Heather Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

Advice

by Jim Harrison

A ratty old man, an Ojibwe alcoholic who lived to be eighty-eight and chewed Red Man tobacco as a joke, told me a few years back that time lasted seven times longer than we “white folks” think. This irritated me. We were sitting on the porch of his shack drinking a bottle of Sapphire gin that I brought over. He liked expensive gin. An old shabby-furred bear walked within ten feet of us on the way to the bird feeder for a mouthful of sunflower seed. “That bear was a puissant as a boy. He’d howl in my window until I made him popcorn with bacon grease. You should buy a green Dodge from the fifties, a fine car but whitewash it in the late fall, and scrub it off May 1. Never drive the highways, take back roads. The Great Spirit made dirt not cement and blacktop. On your walks in the backcountry get to where you’re going, then walk like a heron or a sandhill crane. They don’t miss a thing. Study turtles and chickadees. These bears and wolves around here have too much power for us to handle right. I used to take naps near a female bear who farted a lot during blueberry season. Always curtsey to the police and they’ll leave you alone. They don’t like to deal with what they can’t figure out. Only screw fatter women because they feed you better. This skinny woman over near Munising gave me some crunchy cereal that cut my gums. A bigger woman will cook you ham and eggs. I’ve had my .22 Remington seventy years and now it looks like it’s made out of duct tape. Kerosene is your best fuel. If you row a boat you can’t help but go in a circle. Once I was so cold and hungry I ate a hot deer heart raw. I felt its last beat in my mouth. Sleep outside as much as you can but don’t close your eyes. I had this pet garter snake that lived in my coat pocket for three years. She would come out at night and eat the flies in my shack. Think of your mind as a lake. Give away half the money you make or you’ll become a bad person. During nights of big moons try walking slow as a skunk. You’ll like it. Don’t ever go in a basement. Now I see Teddy’s fish tug coming in. If you buy a six-pack I’ll get us a big lake trout from teddy. I got three bucks burning a hole in my pocket. Women like their feet rubbed. Bring them wildflowers. My mom died when I was nine years old. I got this idea she became a bird and that’s why I talk to birds. Way back then I though the Germans and Japs would kill the world but here we are about ready to cook a fish. What more could you want on an August afternoon?”

From In Search of Small Gods, to be released in April from Copper Canyon Press. Michigan poet Michael Delp will review the book in the March/April issue of ForeWord Magazine.

[Jessie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though a few poems don't achieve lift-off for me, Harrison is fanciful and meandering, a poet inventing endlessly from the detritus of his day and from the detritus of his memory. He's a scallywag but I like him (and who isn't a scallywag?)

My favorite are the prose poems, portraits mostly, full-bodied stories of whole lives: one comprised of advice from an Ojibwe alcoholic; one about a 96-yr-old Estonian working extra shifts as a deckhand just to get more daylight, having suffered too much darkness; one explicitly invented, opening, "I like to think that I was a member of the French Resistance..."

"Poets run on rocks barefoot when shoes are available for a dime."
from "The Penitentes" 40

Here is a mini-portrait I love, "Another Old Mariachi":

"His voice cracks on tremolo notes.
He recalls the labia of women
as the undersides of dove wings,
the birds he retrieved as a boy for rich hunters.
Now in a cantina outside of Hermosillo
he thinks, I don't have much life left
but I have my songs. I'm still the child
with sand sticking to my dew-wet feet
going to the fountain for morning water."

[David Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

The theme running through this entire body of work is the small gods and spirits that populate our world. If we are just careful enough and can get out of our heads we can see these small yet potent spirits as they swirl amongst us. Filled with gut-wrenching humor, beautiful imagery, and jaw-dropping insight that on Harrison could conjure up, this book of poetry is a pure treat. Highly recommend!

[Ahmed Nasr أحمد نصر · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't know why I chose to read poetry by Jim Harrison, but I am so grateful to have read those wise texts. Harrison's literature has always intrigued me since I watched "Legends of the Fall" as a teenager and then read it later as a university guy.

[Ray Nessly · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Calendars', 'Prayer', 'Limb Dancers', 'The Golden Window', 'The Penitentes', 'Easter 2008', 'Late', 'Ninety-Six Year Old Estonian', 'Old Bird Boy', 'The Quarter'.

"It is hard not to see poets as penitentes flaying their brains for a line.
--The Penitentes

". . . The gift of the gods
is consciousness not my forlorn bleating prayers
for equilibrium, the self dog-paddling in circles
in its own alga-lidded pond.

"With only one eye I've learned
to celebrate vision, the eye a painter,
the eye a monstrous fleshy camera
which can't stop itself in the dark
where it sees its private imagination.
The tiny eye that sees the cosmos overhead."
-- The Golden Window

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

note to me: you liked the style, disliked a lot of the content

[Luke Kemmerling · Rating 5 out of 5]

Instant favorite, do yourself a favor and pick this up.

[Dan Butterfass · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another gift from a master.

I don't know if this is his "best" work yet, but what does it matter?
Many many passages are as spirit-haunted and beautiful as any Harrison has ever written. As one reviewer put it some time ago, reading Harrison "is to feel the luminosity of nature in one's own being."

Here's Hayden Carruth on Harrison's oevre:

"No one has advanced and expanded the American literary ethos in the latter part of the twentieth century more cogently, usefully, and just plain brilliantly than Jim Harrison....This is a matter to which all literate Americans should pay serious attention."

Obviously I agree with these statements else I wouldn't quote them.

An interesting tidbit that just occured to me is that as some of Harrison's fictions (The Summer He Didn't Die (2005), The English Major (2008)), seem to have fallen maybe just a notch of late with age, his poetry continues to expand in beauty, depth, breadth and power. The proof of that is in these two latest collections, Saving Daylight and In Search of Small Gods, which might be viewed as companion volumes.

(Note: I said only "some" of his fiction above, as I consider his second-to-last full novel, Returning to Earth (2007), to rank among his finest works of fiction.)

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

The experience of reading this naturalist book primarily about aging, the contrast of the real and imagined life, and the act of observing transports the reader thoroughly into the mind of the narrator. While a particular line might jump out at me from time to time as memorable, The Penitentes is the only poem or prose poem I loved unabashedly from start to finish. I have read better approaches to naturalism, even from Harrison himself, and far more interesting language. Finding enough fascination to pay attention was difficult at points, although I am fond of his sometimes abrupt style, largely lacking in punctuation other than periods. Certainly there is a richness buried in this, and a few poems I intend to return to, but the quality of this book is inconsistent and the language is self-indulgent.

[David Guy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read every word Jim Harrison has ever written, many of them several times. I'm a huge fan of his novels, his essays, and his poetry, though I'm not otherwise much of a poetry reader. In this volume he has some prose poems that seem like passages from his novels; they develop fascinating characters in just a few lines. This isn't necessarily the poetry volume I'd begin with; he has a large selection entitled The Shape of the Journey that is a real feast. But everything the man writes is worth reading.

[Haines Eason · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a faint disdain among current poets for wandering, rough vulnerability, and said vulnerability is what you will find in these poems. Not many poets writing today would admit they are opposed to openness, though (but just read what's vogue--it is clear artifice and irony are privileged). Anyone writing should study Harrison, not so much what he writes, but how: free and wild and almost without a care.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love pret'ner anything that Jim writes, but I am in awe of his poetry. Absolutely in awe. This collection is wonderful and not to be missed. Thank god for Copper Canyon Press for continuing to publish amazing poets like Jim Harrison.

[Joy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bright images, curious ideas, unmoving words.

Admittedly, I may have been left unmoved because I was hoping for more evidence of Michigan than the mountain lions, rattlesnakes, and penstemons of Arizona.

[False · Rating 2 out of 5]

Written in his late sixties-early seventies, more poems about lost relatives, nature, birds, rivers, women he'll never know again and this one:

Poor Girls

They're amputating the head of the poor girl
to put it on the head of the rich girl who needs it to survive.
This is always happening to poor girls
who are without defense. They've sold the contents
of their hope chests on eBay. The never-worn
size 18 wedding dress is cheap because it's black.
I've watched poor girls in diners eat piles of cheap potatoes.
Of course they sometimes marry poor guys
who leave them to work in oil fields or join the army.
I know one who has four children and takes care
of her vegetable husband home from sunny Iraq
with the mental age of a baby in big diapers.
Unmarried poor girls often have bowling clubs
and drink lots of beer Tuesday nights at Starlight Lanes.
They know they're largely invisible cleaning motels:
receptionists, waitresses, fast-food cooks, nannies.
Still they're jolly with friends and nephews and nieces.
I see a great big one wearing a bright blue bathing suit
when I go trout fishing. She parks her old Plymouth
and floats on a truck inner tube on a mile of fast water,
gets out, wheels the tube back through a pasture, does it again.

[Ashton Graydon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Child Fear
Sour milk. Rotten eggs. Bumblebees.
Giant women. Falling through the privy hole.
The snake under the dock that bit my foot.
Snapping turtles. Electric fences. Howling bears.
The neighbor’s big dog that tore apart
the black lamb. Oil wells. Train wheels.
Dentists and doctors. Hitler and Tj. Eye pain.
School superintendent with three gold teeth.
Cow’s infected udder, angry draft horse.
School fire. Snake under hay bale. Life’s end.

That your dead dogs won’t meet you in heaven.

———That last line gets me every time. I kept this book in my backpack for many years until it started falling apart.

[melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.8 stars? That's oddly specific, I guess, but this collection had some real gems and insightful lines and also some poems that didn't speak to me.

"The sexuality of insects tells us that intentional life is a hoax but the gods tell us that we are also gods." Goat Boy

"Years ago in a high green pasture near timberline I watched a small black bear on its back rolling back and forth and shimmying to scratch its back, pawing the air with pleasure, not likely wanting to be anywhere or anyone else." Burning the Ditches

[Michael John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was introduced to Harrison recently by reading an article posted by my college creative writing professor (though my class with him was 25 years ago!) I asked myself immediately "how did this amazing writer elude me so far in my life?" The poetry in this book really speaks to me - nature, fishing in western rivers, growing old, and appreciation of such diverse places as Montana and Southern Arizona. Also his use of bird names in poetry is unique - you can tell that he has spent some time birdwatching. I enjoyed this collection and am eager to read more of his writing.

[Julius · Rating 2 out of 5]

In my completely uneducated opinion this was mostly ramblings and mutterings, sprinkled with references to objects and locations only the poet finds meaningful. Literature and poetry should be published when it concerns something other humans can relate to. For me this read like personal poetry/journaling.

[Mike Dennisuk · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the third book of Harrison poems I’ve read this year. I slow read the poetry, perhaps a poem or twos day. He speaks of mortality and hidden gods. My favorite poem arrived at the end of the collection ... “Eleven Dawns with Su Tung-P’o” ... the best line at the end “who knows what glorious wine comes next in my sunny kingdom of dogs, birds and fish”. Beautiful!

[Jennifer Fitzpatrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jim Harrison lived in the wild open world, a world where anything is possible, and animals and birds converse. His appetite was huge, as was his love of life. This tiny tome is filled with the language of the gods, a collection of poems in which he poignantly calls for each of us to live life to the fullest.

[Cheryl Walsh · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are some great lines in this collection, but I didn't find any great poems. I appreciate the accessibility of Harrison's poetry, and I like the subject matter of the natural world. I just didn't find the compression of meaning and language that makes me admire a poem, or the layers of meaning that move me emotionally.

[Katy-Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jim Harrison’s writing transports me back to watching my father rock in rocking chairs and write in his journals on both our wide front porch in central Kansas and on the porches of the fog enveloped log cabins deep in the Smoky Mountains. His writing reminds me of breathing in morning air in a space hugged by both nature and nurture.

[Daniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were wonderful turns of phrases and endings with a twist that recast the meaning of the poem scattered throughout. Perhaps there was more meaning to more of his poems than I was able to comprehend.

[Richard OConnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I find rating such ridiculous for the most part. What stirs my heart may repulse someone else. But for me this collection of Harrison’s glimpses of life are stirring to my heart. Call me a sap but the man can move mountains with three lines.

[Cathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm a big fan of Jim Harrison's novels, but I can't say I was thrilled by his poetry. The exceptions were the prose poems in this collection. My favorite was "Advice" in which an 88-year-old Ojibwe alcoholic gives some advice.