Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems -- Jim Harrison

<b>An untrammeled renegade genius... </b>Here is a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language.--<i>Publishers Weekly</i> <p/>Starred Review in <i>Booklist</i></b>: "[C]hoices of poems from each of Harrison's books are passionate and sharp... Of special note is a section from <i>Letters to Yesenin</i>, a book-length poem, and the title poem from <i>The Theory and Practice of Rivers </i>, which contains these echoing lines, 'I forgot where I heard that poems / are designed to waken sleeping gods.' Reading this essential volume, one might imagine that the gods are, indeed, staying up late, reading lights on, turning the pages." <p/><i>Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems</i> is distilled from fourteen volumes--from visionary lyrics and meditative suites to shape-shifting ghazals and prose-poem letters. Teeming throughout these pages are Harrison's legendary passions and appetites, his meditations, rages, and love-songs to the natural world. <p/><i>The New York Times</i> concluded a review from early in Harrison's career with a provocative quote: "This is poetry worth loving, hating, and fighting over, a subjective mirror of our American days and needs." That sentiment still holds true, as Jim Harrison's essential poems continue to call for our fiercest attention. <p/>Also included are full-color images of poem drafts--both typescripts and holographs--as well as the letter Denise Levertov sent to publisher W.W