The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems

Harrison, Jim

ISBN 10: 1556590954 / ISBN 13: 9781556590955

Published by Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA, 1998

About this Item

Octavo (22.5 cm), pp. 463. Black spine cloth over burgundy boards with Harrison's one-eyed self-portrait blind-stamped on upper board and gilt titling. Jacket art is Russell Chatham's "Sunset at Deep Creek." Indroduction by the author. Includes first line and title indices. Slight edge wear to boards and jacket, else fine. [Orr & Torrey, A32.b].

Seller Inventory # 39565

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA
• Publication Date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1556590954
• ISBN 13: 9781556590955
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Near fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

Combines the poet's out-of-print works from eight previous books with a suite of new poems

From the Publisher

"This book...means the most to me." --Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison is best known for his fiction (Legends of the Fall; Dalva), but he has published more poetry collections than novels. Since all but two of these poetry volumes have quietly slipped out of print, The Shape of the Journey allows readers the long-overdue opportunity to confirm Harrison's rightful place among the finest poets writing today.

Included is an introduction by Harrison, several previously uncollected poems, an index to first lines, and "Geo-Bestiary," a new thirty-four part suite rooted in Harrison's legendary passions for food, sex. poetry, and the natural world.

Concerning Harrison's work, The New York Times wrote: "This is poetry worth loving, hating, and fighting over."

Publishers Weekly noted that Harrison's poetry was the work of an "untrammeled renegade genius...Here's a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language."

Booklist gave The Shape of the Journey a starred and boxed review, and stated: "Harrison is most readily identified with his fiction, including the just-out The Road Home, but, as he explains in the striking introduction to this superb collection, it is his poetry that means the most to him. He equates writing poetry with creating cave paintings or petroglyphs, so intrinsically human is the urge to express the life of the soul, and his poems do make the temporal timeless. Beginning with spare and lovely poems from Plain Song (1965), Harrison offers the best of seven subsequent collection, including the heart-revving howl of Letters to Yesenin (1973) and the Zen-influenced After Ikkyu (1996), followed by a set of new poems that go off, like fireworks, with a bang followed by a radiant bloom. A man temperamentally unsuited to cities and academia, Harrison is drawn to the endlessly enlightening beauty of nature and sustained by the awareness of mind kindled by the practices of writing, Zen Buddhism, and walking the earth. Readers can wander the woods of this collection for a lifetime and still be amazed at what they find."