Review by Booklist Review
Harrison's welcoming poems are musings, prayers, vignettes, and fragments of a self-deprecating self-portrait-in-progress. Hoping to avoid the numbers game of time and money, the calendared, to-do-list life, he migrates like a bird, walks with his beloved dogs, watches the sun ignite water, and listens to the music of rain. Funny and tender beneath a wry and gruff seen-it-all veneer, Harrison contemplates death, discerns divinity in every stone and leaf, and nobility in ordinary lives, and laughs at our attempts to separate ourselves from the rest of nature. Bears, snakes, cats, a goat in a cemetery, a tree, a spring, all carry memories and messages, if only we could decipher them. In his seventh decade and thirtysomething book, Harrison, writing with more force and lucidity than ever, performs a cosmic soft-shoe beneath the shape-shifting moon, then lifts his head and howls to mark the pain and suffering all around us, from the house down the road to the blasted cities of Iraq. The gift of the gods / is consciousness, Harrison declares, and we'd best cherish life's perpetual metamorphosis.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Harrison (Legends of the Fall) has over decades won a durable following for verse and fiction about the wild places, solitudes and the exhilarations of the American West. This 12th book of verse gives familiar, quotable rural pleasures-solitude, ease, forests and big skies-along with a new focus on the poet's advancing years. "I keep waiting without knowing/ what I'm waiting for," Harrison says in "Age Sixty-Nine"; in that waiting, he adds, "on local earth my heart/ is at rest as a groundling." In low-pressure free verse, and in the prose poems that make up half the volume, Western American landscapes and beasts soar and roam off the page. (Mexican places and people, unfortunately, do not: they are leaden stereotypes.) People, for Harrison, are beasts as well, "marine organisms at the bottom of the ocean/ of air." Paying homage to instinct, loyalty, memory and a companionable ferocity, Harrison finds his best subjects, often enough, in dogs. "I know dog language fairly well," he explains, "but then dogs hold a little back from us because we don't know their secret names given them by the dog gods." "Barking" brings the poet closer to the canine kingdom still: "I was a dog on a short chain," he complains, "and now there's no chain." (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Noted novelist Harrison (The English Major), also a fine poet, writes like a man reconciling the world at large with the natural world he knows well, one that still fascinates and inspires him. Many of his small gods are dogs, and many of them are fish or birds, that is, chickadees and hawks, willow flycatchers and hummingbirds: "Most birds own the ancient/ clock of north and south, a clock that never had hands, the god-time/ with which the universe began." He looks at them all with awe and ironic amusement. A group of prose poems centers this volume. Whether he imagines an Estonian World War II veteran who is fascinated by light or Vallejo in Paris, collecting empty wine bottles for small change, Harrison is heavily invested in narrative elements that range from the real to the surreal. One wondrous poem, "On Horseback in China," spins a tale filled with intriguing and magical turns. What joins these poems into a cohesive whole is the search for identity, still an important ritual for a man of any age: "I had become the moving water I already am." Highly recommended.-Karla Huston, Appleton Art Ctr., WI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
