The Shape of the Journey

Jim Harrison

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.