Jim Harrison: Complete Poems

by Jim Harrison, Joseph Bednarik (Editor), Terry Tempest Williams (Introduction)

Jim Harrison: Complete Poems is the definitive collection from one of America’s iconic writers. Introduced by activist and naturalist writer Terry Tempest Williams, this tour de force contains every poem Harrison published over his fifty-year career and displays his wide range of poetic styles and forms. Here are the nature-based lyrics of his early work, the high-velocity ghazals, a harrowing prose-poem “correspondence” with a Russian suicide, the riverine suites, fearless meditations inspired by the Zen monk Crazy Cloud, and a joyous conversation in haiku-like gems with friend and fellow poet Ted Kooser. Weaving throughout these 1000 pages are Harrison’s legendary passions and appetites, his love songs and lamentations, and a clarion call to pay attention to the life you are actually living. The Complete Poems confirms that Jim Harrison is a talented storyteller with a penetrating eye for details.

Genres: Poetry

931 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 1, 2021

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

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having been born and raised in Michigan, it is practically a requirement that if you are inclined towards poetry that you investigate the works of Michigan-born poet and novelist Jim Harrison. For me, poetry has always been something that came alive in the outdoors, blooming in the mind on a walk amidst the trees, an art that seems best read or written beside a river seated in long grass. For me that river was the Red Cedar River—the same river Harrison likely stolled alongside during his time at Michigan State University forty years before me—and later the Huron River in East Michigan when suddenly my desire for writing poetry took over any other art form and I could be always found alongside the Huron with a stack of books, chain-smoking the sun down and drinking up the moon to create a fumbling person Eden in scattered notebooks. It was around this time that a friend’s older brother passed me a copy of After Ikkyu & Other Poems by Harrison, saying I basically had to read him if I was going to posture as a poet in Michigan. I found it a bit hippy-ish, the whole white guy doing buddhism thing, but also loved the way nature figured so prominently with existential investigation into life and death. The sort of poetry that threads you to the universe and when it pierces your heart only stars pour out. I copied this one into a notebook:

Twilight

For the first time
far in the distance
he could see his twilight
wrapping around the green hill
where three rivers start,
and sliding down toward him
through the trees until it reached
the blueberry marsh and stopped,
telling him to go away, not now,
not for the time being.

I would think on Harrison from time to time and read a few of his novels over the years. He is best known for Legends of the Fall, which made for a fantastic film with Brad Pitt, Julia Ormond and Aidan Quinn that will stomp out your heart, though I have always found his poetry to be far more engaging. His books tend to get fairly misogynistic which has always turned me off of them but luckily the poetry tends to avoid this, at least more so in the later ones. I feel in his poems we see a more tender Jim Harrison that is less bravado and more willing to press on into life, stopping to appreciate the beauty even in the dark moments and singing praise to the land. Years after I first encountered him I picked up a recently published volume of poems and discovered what would become a favorite poem for a long time:

Poet Warning

He went to sea
in a thimble of poetry
without sail or oars
or anchor. What chance
do I have, he thought?
hundreds of thousands
of moons have drowned out here
and there are no gravestones.

That poem (from Songs of Unreason) struck me, feeling a perfect quiet anthem of creative types who latch themselves into poetry as their vessel into oblivion. I wrote it on the wall of my apartment where it stayed for years until I had to paint over it when I moved and when I began my public poetry project it was one I frequently left whenever I came to a new place. When I did a poetry reading at MSU for their lit mag, years after having attended, I left that poem—scrawled in ink on a painting of a ship at sea I did—attached to the tree that was outside my old dorm window. It’s been my calling card I suppose.

‘Death steals everything except our stories,’ Harrison wrote, and in March of 2016 death finally stole him from us. I was a delivery driver at the time, cruising around delivering bulk coffee and when I heard I pulled into a bookstore in South Bend and picked up a copy of In Search of Small Gods they happened to have on hand. That little book traveled with me for weeks and became a prized possession, the margins full of my thoughts and bad poetry lines of my own that came to me while driving. It hit hard in many ways, particularly how often Harrison contemplates death as he himself is ‘climbing this tree as old as the world’ and calls time ‘our subtle poison, but it was when he talks about his deceased dogs that the chills of beauty really grabbed me.

Friends

Dogs, departed companions,
I told you that the sky would fall in
and it did. How will we see each other again
when we’re without eyes? We’ll figure it out
as we used to when you led me back
to the cabin in the forest in the dark.

Complete Poems is exactly what it sounds like: its all the poems. From the start of his career in the 60s when Denise Levertov helped him bring Plain Song into the world, to poems left behind after his death (including photos of handwritten poems left on his desk), this is the complete collection of his poetry. Personally I tend to prefer his later stuff, but there’s seriously something in here for everyone. There is a collection of his letters-in-poetry between himself and fellow poet Ted Kooser, and one of my favorite books of his is Letters to Yesenin, poems Harrison wrote to the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, who died in 1925 with his farewell written as a poem in his own blood attached to his chest when he hung himself. Here is the third “letter”:


I wanted to feel exalted so I picked up
Doctor Zhivago again. But the newspaper was there
with the horrors of the Olympics, those dead and
perpetually martyred sons of David. I want to present
all Israelis with .357 magnums so that they are
never to be martyred again. I wanted to be exalted
so I picked up Doctor Zhivago again but the TV was on
with a movie about the sufferings of convicts in
the early history of Australia. But then the movie
was over and the level of the bourbon bottle was dropping
and I still wanted to be exalted lying there with
the book on my chest. I recalled Moscow but I could
not place dear Yuri, only you Yesenin, seeing the Kremlin
glitter and ripple like Asia. And when drunk you appeared
as some Bakst stage drawing, a slain Tartar. But that is
all ballet. And what a dance you had kicking your legs from
the rope–We all change our minds, Berryman said in Minnesota
halfway down the river. Villon said of the rope that my neck
will feel the weight of my ass. But I wanted to feel exalted
again and read the poems at the end of Doctor Zhivago and
just barely made it. Suicide. Beauty takes my courage
away this cold autumn evening. My year-old daughter's red
robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop.

The thing that always strikes me about Harrison is how much of a spiritual exercise it is to read his poems. Harrison studied zen, though did not feel right referring to himself as a buddhist but the lessons make their way into his poetry and occasionally I find his works feel adjacent to Jane Hirshfield and Mary Oliver who both practiced buddhism.

‘Wake up.
Listen to the gods. / They’re shouting in your ear every second.
We disembowled the earth and die without lungs.
But birds / lead us outside where we belong.
Only the most extreme heat makes us malleable.’

This is a fantastic collection, perfectly published by Copper Canyon Press and I quite appreciate that they included in the appendix a letter from Harrison reflecting on his own poetry collections. This is an essential volume not only for a Harrison lover but really anyone who enjoys poems that wed the self with the infinity of the natural world. We lost a good one when we lost Harrison, but his poems live on and I’ll never pass a river in the woods without thinking about his work.

4.5/5

Quarantine (from Dead Man's Float)

I've been quarantined by the gods.
Do no harm, they said.
Tell no secrets. I had stored
my spirit in the big willow tree to the west
of my study on the advice of Rumi.
It was getting badly bruised every day
and my spirit needed a resting place.
I forgot where I put it when you
should check it every morning.
I sank lower and lower until one day
I called it back from the tree
then wrote a pretty good poem.
There is no time to fool around, the gods said.
They blew my poem with the wind to
the top of Antelope Butte. I can't walk there
with my cane. Some gods have been dead
a thousand years and need our magic
and music to come back to life.
We owe it to them. They got us started.

[Ken · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jim Harrison. What a character. And so unusual in our times in that he is a knowledgeable guide to the great outdoors where most of his poetry lives (and dies... this being nature). I say that because most modern-era poetry, like most modern-era poets, lives indoors and would really struggle at correctly naming more than 10 trees, types of fish, kinds of birds.

In “The Whisper,” one of the last poems he wrote before death finally caught up with him, Jim Harrison wrote: “But birds/lead us outside where we belong./Around here all the gods live in trees.

If you don’t get outside as much as you should (and, chances are, you don’t), you can at least get the vicarious thrill (and I would say a convincing argument) by reading the 900-plus paged Jim Harrison Complete Poems.

Though Harrison loved food, drink, and women, his first and most enduring love was the great outdoors. His poetry shows it. Among his gods, he shows greatest devotion to birds, fish, and dogs. And a keen eye for weather, land, and water. Harrison names things with a guide’s eye, and though any lifetime collection of poetry will be uneven, the reader can’t help but appreciate the voice, strong and friendly, that acts like Virgil guiding us through the book. Better yet, the voice only gets stronger as it wends its casual way to the end, too.

Many of the poems are built on memory. A good example is this tale of Harrison’s grandfather:


What He Said When I Was Eleven

August, a dense heat wave at the cabin
mixed with torrents of rain,
the two-tracks become miniature rivers.

In the Russian Orthodox Church
one does not talk to God, one sings.
This empty and sun-blasted land

has a voice rising in shimmers.
I did not sing in Moscow
but St. Basil’s in Leningrad raised

a quiet tune. But now seven worlds
away I hang the cazas-moscas
from the ceiling and catch seven flies

in the first hour, buzzing madly
against the stickiness. I’ve never seen
the scissor-tailed flycatcher, a favorite

bird of my youth, the worn Audubon
card pinned to the wall. When I miss
flies three times with the swatter

they go free for good. Fair is fair.
There is too much nature pressing against
the window as if it were a green night;

and the river swirling in glazed turbulence
is less friendly than ever before.
Forty years ago she called, Come home, come home,

It’s suppertime. I was fishing a fishless
cattle pond with a new three-dollar pole,
dreaming the dark blue ocean of pictures.

In the barn I threw down hay
while my Swede grandpa finished milking,
squirting the barn cat’s mouth with an udder.

I kissed the wet nose of my favorite cow,
drank a dipper of fresh warm milk
and carried two pails to the house,

scraping the manure off my feet
in the pump shed. She poured the milk
in the cream separator and I began cranking.

At supper the oilcloth was decorated
with worn pink roses. We ate cold herring,
also bluegills we had caught at daylight.

The fly-strip above the table idled in
the window’s breeze, a new fly in its death buzz.
Grandpa said, “We are all flies.”

That’s what he said forty years ago.


As he ages, Harrison grows more philosophical and tangos frankly with the more apparent subject of death. It only adds greater depth to his wisdom, nature being the perfect metaphor for the birth-death-birth cycle that so fascinated him.


Midnight Blues Planet

We’re marine organisms at the bottom of the ocean
of air. Everywhere esteemed nullities rule our days.
How ineluctably we travel from our preembryonic
state to so much dead meat on the ocean’s hard floor.
There is this song of ice in our hearts. Here we struggle
mightily to keep our breathing holes opened
from the lid of suffocation. We have misunderstood the stars.
Clocks make our lives a slow-motion frenzy. We can’t get
off the screen back into the world where we could live.
Every so often we hear the current of night music
from the gods who swim and fly as we once did.


Though he wrote novels, novellas, and essays, Harrison considered himself first and foremost a poet, making this lifetime collection that much more important to his legacy. Some compare him to Charles Bukowski (who had less of a connection with the natural world) and Ernest Hemingway (who lacked Harrison’s humor and gentle empathy), but neither comparison is fair. Harrison is Harrison, a one-eyed sage of the flower and fauna, river and ruin. Here is an example of his dark humor:


Poet Warning

He went to sea
in a thimble of poetry
without sail or oars
or anchor. What chance
do I have, he thought?
Hundreds of thousands
of moons have drowned out here
and there are no gravestones.


And here one of love for his wife on the occasion of their 50th anniversary. As is true with many of his works, he approaches subjects tangentially before hitting on this topic – the sort of thing a teacher of poetry would warn you against. Note, too, how he mines some of the same material as “What He Said When I Was Eleven,” only this time, being decades later, with a more mature approach.


Our Anniversary

I want to go back to the wretched old farm
on a cold November morning eating herring
on the oil tablecloth at daylight, the hard butter
in slivers and chunks on rye bread, gold-colored
homemade butter. Fill the woodbox, Jimmy.
Clots of cream in the coffee, hiss and crackle
of woodstove. Outside it’s been the hardest freeze
yet but the heels still break through into the earth.
A winter farm is dead and you want to head for the woods.
In the barn the smell of manure and still-green hay
hit the nose with the milk in the metal pails.
Grandpa is on the last of seven cows,
tugging their dicklike udders a squirt in the mouth
for the barn cat. My girlfriend loves another
and at twelve it’s as if all the trees have died.
Sixty years later seven hummingbirds at the feeder,
miniature cows in their stanchions sipping liquid sugar.
We are fifty years together. There are still trees.


Harrison is what is known as an “approachable” poet in that his style and topic matter is earthly. He is not one to tackle style or form. Rather, free verse is the lingua franca of his land. Don’t be fooled, however. His allusions have deep roots. Harrison read the best and used their names and experiences to leaven his own poetry. In these collected works, you will meet the likes of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Frederico García Lorca, Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Virgil, W.C. Williams, René Char, Ikkyū, César Vallejo, Octavio Paz, Su Tung P’o, and, famously (thanks to his collection Letters to Yesenin), Sergei Yesenin.

Whether you read this hefty book cover-to-cover or use it as a side-dipper while reading others, you will feel, at the end, like you are saying farewell to a good friend and, in doing so, saying hello to your own approaching end. Thinking about his boyhood days, Harrison finishes the poem “Seven in the Woods” with these words: “It is the burden of life to be many ages/without seeing the end of time.” And in “The Present,” he meditates on birds yet again before ending on this note of a lifetime: “The cost of flight is landing.”

Alas, Jim Harrison has landed, but reading his collected work in the genre he considered most important, we can only give thanks for what he learned during his long, migratory flight.

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

But I've no right to bring you back to life. We must
respect your affection for the rope. You knew the exact juncture
in your life when the act of dangling could be made a dance.

Letters to Yesenin was revelatory. It was a shock to my system, being million of miles from most of his novellas which I read and then forgot earlier this year. There's a labor involved in tackling a complete poems, especially one as handsome as this particular volume as a physical object. It is heavy. Conversely the poems tend to perambulate. There are indeed many tree stumps. There are dogs and of course there are birds. Rattlesnakes mark an important inclusion; nested in writhing knots, the snakes brought to mind the rose bowls of Rilke. Harrison honors his traditions of verse and more importantly his family. The poet looks to Lorca and grieves both him and Harrison's own sister who died along with their father in an auto accident. The final third constitute a paen to mortality, one that was mercifully deferred for fifteen years.

On a new side of night I asked the gods to not let me learn too much.

Perhaps my favorite element of the tome was Harrison's devotion to the ghazal form. Harrison shines in these explorations.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eight months. 944 pages. And now as I read the final poem, unfinished because Harrison died while writing it, sitting at his desk, I wish I would have started with the last poem and read to the beginning. To see a poet go from his last day on earth to his first published poem as a young man. To go in reverse from sorrow to wonder.

How to review a collections of hundreds of poems? I won't begin to try. I can only say thank you to this irreverent, tender, unruly, wholly alive soul who loved dogs, wine and women (probably in that order), who cherished nature and Lorca, and generally hated society. And who wrote stirring, grounded, gracious poetry. Like collections by Seamus Heaney or Louise Glück, I will open any page of Jim Harrison: Complete Poems and be moved, and glad.

NutHatch Girl

The gods lost footing and rolled down
the mountain into a heap at the bottom.

We have to do thus and so to keep
them alive.

Everyone forgot their assignment
except a young girl from Missouri
who danced down a cliff bare naked.

She's part bird so it was cheating a little.

Gods encourage supernatural cheating.

Meanwhile the girl climbed up a tree
like a nuthatch to read Rumi aloud
in his original language.

It's up to poets to revive the gods.
***

It's up to poets to revive the gods

This. This is all there is.

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 5 out of 5]

SHE

My wife died in the autumn.
Now on Saturday morning down here
on the Mexican border my housekeeper,
an Apache Tarahumara woman, sings me a lament
in Spanish of love and death. We were
married fifty-six years, fell in love two years before
that. My soul knows this song she sings.
This so far is a haunting, the bleeding heart
we used to hear about. I’ve been told the heart
will run out of blood but I doubt it.
Lover, come back to me.

[Tim Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I savored my way through this book for 3 years, and I don't like that it's over. Thankfully it's massive and worth re-reading the dog eared favorites, which are many. It was interesting to chart Jim Harrison's way as he finds his voice, made possible by the chronological way the book is set up. His first poems aren't good, and don't sound like him - but I kept reading, knowing a little of the gold ahead, and watched as he honed in on the themes and quirks that makes him probably my all time favorite poet. Most of his work isn't very long, and is approachable - he was and is a master of the art form. Long Live Jim Harrison.

[Enry Ravaglini · Rating 2 out of 5]

Man. Really not down with Jim. Sorry.

[David Abrams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this concrete block of a book this morning, four months and one week after starting it, and now I feel much closer to understanding who Jim Harrison was as a poet and as a human being: he was lusty, yes, he was made of earth and twigs and duck fat, he ogled women, he bathed naked under full moons, he ate like a vacuum cleaner and then walked about painfully on gouty feet. He was big and brash and full of life. Larger than life (it's true, he continues to loom large after death; life couldn't contain him). But he was also reflective, religious (in the Zen sense of things) and in his later years, swollen with humility. He was worlds within worlds, complicated, not always who you'd expect. I feel I met the real Jim Harrison here, and along the way I met myself. These 900-plus pages of poetry took me on a journey for most of 2023--into my secret inner landscape and outward to the world.

[Jorė]

this is one of those books that don’t fit into any ratings.
what can be said about someones life-time work beyond “good job”?

so i leave here some random lines from my notes instead:

“The moon I saw through her legs beneath the cherry tree had no footprints on it and a thigh easily blocked out its light.”

“to study rivers, including the postcard waterfalls, is to adopt another life; a limited life attaches itself to the endless movement, the renowned underground rivers of South America which I’ve felt thundering far beneath my feet—to die is to descend into such rivers and flow along in the perfect dark.”

“Tonight I’ll touch your wrist and in a year perhaps grind my blind eye’s socket against your hipbone. With all this death, behind our backs, the moon has become the moon again.”

[j e rodriguez · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?"

[Kevin Pal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incomparable collection from a celebrated writer; a wonderful opportunity to move through Harrison's writing over the course of 50 years of a hard life well-lived.

[Doc · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awestruck with this lifetime of poetic work.

[Carrie Cantalupo-Sharp · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want this book!!!!!

[Celeste · Rating 5 out of 5]

impenetrable poems. even when they're bad, they're good. you'll want to eat, drink, fuck, and go into the woods joyfully and gladly.

[Vanjr · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am probably way too early in my journey of poetry to appreciate this. But certainly a number of lines resonate with my mind.

[Nicholas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fucking epic.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will be reading this comprehensive collection of Harrison's Poems for years. Lovely work.