Customize Consent Preferences

We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.

The cookies that are categorized as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ... 

Always Active

Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.

Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.

No cookies to display.

Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

No cookies to display.

Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.

No cookies to display.

Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customized advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyze the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.

No cookies to display.

Use coupon code “MARCH20” for a 20% discount on all items! Valid until 31-03-2025

Site Logo
Site Logo

Royal Mail  express delivery to UK destinations

Regular sales and promotions

Stock updates every 20 minutes!

Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems

Out of stock

Firm sale: non returnable item
SKU 9781556595288 Categories ,
Publishers Weekly called Jim Harrison “an untrammeled renegade genius,” a poet who performed “absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language.”
"An untrammeled renegade genius... Here is a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and ...

£12.99

Buy new:

Delivery: UK delivery Only. Usually dispatched in 1-2 working days.

Shipping costs: All shipping costs calculated in the cart or during the checkout process.

Standard service (normally 2-3 working days): 48hr Tracked service.

Premium service (next working day): 24hr Tracked service – signature service included.

Royal mail: 24 & 48hr Tracked: Trackable items weighing up to 20kg are tracked to door and are inclusive of text and email with ‘Leave in Safe Place’ options, but are non-signature services. Examples of service expected: Standard 48hr service – if ordered before 3pm on Thursday then expected delivery would be on Saturday. If Premium 24hr service used, then expected delivery would be Friday.

Signature Service: This service is only available for tracked items.

Leave in Safe Place: This option is available at no additional charge for tracked services.

Description

Product ID:9781556595288
Product Form:Paperback / softback
Country of Manufacture:GB
Title:Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems
Authors:Author: Jim Harrison, Joseph Bednarik
Page Count:200
Subjects:Poetry, Poetry
Description:Publishers Weekly called Jim Harrison “an untrammeled renegade genius,” a poet who performed “absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language.”
"An untrammeled renegade genius... Here is a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language."—Publishers Weekly

Starred Review in Booklist: “[C]hoices of poems from each of Harrison’s books are passionate and sharp… Of special note is a section from Letters to Yesenin, a book-length poem, and the title poem from The Theory and Practice of Rivers , 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.”

Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems 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.

The New York Times 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.

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. Norton in the early 1960s, advocating for Harrison''s debut collection.

In his essay "Poetry as Survival," Jim Harrison wrote, "Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak." The Essential Poems is proof positive that Jim Harrison taught his soul to speak.

"In this unforgiving literary moment, we must deal honestly with [Harrison''s] life and work, as they are inextricable in a way that is not true of other poets...These poems bear-crawl gorgeously after a genuine connection to being, thrashing in giant leaps through the underbrush to find consolation, purpose, and redemption. In his raw, original keening he ambushes moments of unimaginable beauty, one after another, line after line...The Essential Poems demonstrates perfectly why we should turn to Harrison again. He lived and breathed an American confrontation with the physical earth, married himself to a universe of bodies and stumps and birds, did not try to shuck his grotesque masculinity and stared hard with his one good eye (the left was blinded when he was seven) at the inescapable, beckoning finger of death." —Dean Kuipers, LitHub

The Essential Poems provides a good introduction—or reintroduction—to the work of this singular writer… these pieces illustrate Harrison’s range and his ease with various formats, from lyric poems to meditative suites to prose poems. They also spotlight his deep, rugged kinship with rural landscapes and the natural world, where ‘the cost of flight is landing.’” —The Washington Post

"Jim Harrison''s latest collection, The Essential Poems, contains...engaging and enlightening poems [that] should be taught, learned, and loved. Remember this."—New York Journal of Books

"Had he been a chef, all the other foodies would have talked about how Jim Harrison dealt with big flavors. In his poems, they’re all there — love and death, remorse and longing, the rocket contrails of living. There’s not a lot of small talk in The Essential Poems... this book grabs you by the collar and tells you in eleven hundred ways to wake up."—John Freeman, Executive Editor, "Recommended Reading from Lit Hub Staff"

"Jim Harrison had an appetite. He devoured the natural world with gusto and wrote about it with wild energy and sweetly caustic wit...Harrison was also a prodigious poet, and this thoughtfully curated collection [The Essential Poems] showcases him at his best. Like his fiction, the poems observe the collision between civilization and the wildness outside our cities; they act like geocaches both harrowing and beautiful... Organized chronologically, the material here becomes a time line distilling Harrison''s signature concerns."—Alta

"It is hard-boiled poetry, some of the best of its kind, and one is not surprised to know that Harrison has written very tough novels... His poetic vision is at the heart of it all."—Harper''s

The Heart''s Work: Jim Harrison''s Poetic Legacy: The Heart''s Work is a multi-book, multi-year publishing project by Copper Canyon Press to secure and advance Jim Harrison''s poetic legacy. To date, books published as part of the The Heart''s Work include The Essential Poems, Collected Ghazals (with afterword by Denver Butson), Jim Harrison: Complete Poems (produced as both a single volume and a three-volume box set, with introductions by Terry Tempest Williams, Colum McCann, Joy Williams, and John Freeman), and the paperback printing of Dead Man''s Float. New projects forthcoming!


Imprint Name:Copper Canyon Press,U.S.
Publisher Name:Copper Canyon Press,U.S.
Country of Publication:GB
Publishing Date:2019-07-11