Jim Harrison Complete Poems Boxed Set: Limited Edition Boxed Set - Rilegato

Harrison, Jim

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1556596413 ISBN 13: 9781556596414

Casa editrice: Copper Canyon Pr, 2022

Riassunto

A companion to the single volume, this box set is limited to 750 copies.

Starred Review from Booklist: "[A] landmark collection."

Jim Harrison (1937-2016) is an American literary icon, famous for his novellas Legends of the Fall and Brown Dog,and his novels Dalva, Farmer, and Sundog. At the bedrock of Harrison’s success was his lifelong, enduring love of poetry. Over a fifty year writing career, in addition to his prolific work as a fiction writer, screenwriter, and beloved food critic, he published fourteen volumes of original poetry—now presented in this three-volume set.

Jim Harrison: Complete Poems: Limited Edition Box Set features the entirety of Harrison’s poetic oeuvre in handsome hardbacks, organized by distinct eras. Print run release limited to 750 copies.

This tour de force also features a thoughtful and thought-provoking essay by a major literary figure for each volume:

• Colum McCann, Vol. I
• Joy Williams, Vol II
• John Freeman, Vol III

Woven throughout these three volumes are Harrison’s legendary passions and appetites, his love songs and lamentations, and a clarion call to pay attention.As Joy Williams notes in her essay to Volume II: “I’ve always loved Jim Harrison’s poetry—so full of itself, so direct and hungry and angered and awed. I think of him in many ways as a religious poet...he felt that only in poetry had he found ‘the right pen’ to write what he wanted to say.”

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Informazioni sull?autore

Jim Harrison (1937–2016) was the author of over three dozen books, including Legends of the Fall and Dalva, and served as the food columnist for the magazines Brick and Esquire. He published fourteen volumes of poetry, the final being Dead Man’s Float (2016), which appeared a few months before his death. His work has been translated into two dozen languages and produced as four feature-length films. As a young poet he co-edited Sumac magazine with fellow poet Dan Gerber, and earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2007, he was elected into the Academy of American Arts and Letters. Regarding his most beloved art form, he wrote: “Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.” Jim Harrison certainly spoke the language.

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Poem

Form is the woods: the beast,
a bobcat padding through red sumac,
the pheasant in brake or goldenrod
that he stalks – both rise to the flush,
the brief low flutter and catch in air;
and trees, rich green, the moving of boughs
and the separate leaf, yield
to conclusions they do not care about
or watch – the dead, frayed bird,
the beautiful plumage,
the spoor of feathers
and slight, pink bones.


Walking

Walking back on a chill morning past Kilmer’s Lake
into the first broad gully, down its trough
and over a ridge of poplar, scrub oak, and into
a larger gully, walking into the slow fresh warmth
of midmorning to Spider Lake where I drank
at a small spring remembered from ten years back;
walking northwest two miles where another gully
opened, seeing a stump on a knoll where my father
stood one deer season, and tiring of sleet and cold
burned a pine stump, the snow gathering fire-orange
on a dull day; walking past charred stumps blackened
by the ’81 fire to a great hollow stump near a basswood
swale – I sat within it on a November morning
watching deer browse beyond my young range of shotgun
and slug, chest beating hard for killing –
into the edge of a swale waist-high with ferns,
seeing the quick movement of a blue racer,
and thick curl of the snake against a birch log,
a pale blue with nothing of the sky in it,
a fleshy blue, blue of knotted veins in an arm;
walking to Savage’s Lake where I ate my bread
and cheese, drank cool lake water, and slept for a while,
dreaming of fire, snake and fish and women in white
linen walking, pinkish warm limbs beneath white linen;
then walking, walking homeward toward Well’s Lake,
brain at boil now with heat, afternoon glistening
in yellow heat, dead dun-brown grass, windless,
with all distant things shimmering, grasshoppers, birds
dulled to quietness; walking a log road near a cedar swamp
looking cool with green darkness and whine of mosquitoes,
crow’s caw overhead, Cooper’s hawk floating singly
in mateless haze; walking dumbly, footsore, cutting
into evening through sumac and blackberry brambles,
onto the lake road, feet sliding in the gravel,
whippoorwills, night birds wakening, stumbling to lake
shore, shedding clothes on sweet moss; walking
into syrupy August moonless dark, water cold, pushing
lily pads aside, walking out into the lake with feet
springing on mucky bottom until the water flows overhead;
sinking again to walk on the bottom then buoyed up,
walking on the surface, moving through beds of reeds,
snakes and frogs moving, to the far edge of the lake
then walking upward over the basswood and alders, the field
of sharp stubble and hay bales, toward the woods,
floating over the bushy crests of hardwoods and tips
of pine, barely touching in miles of rolling heavy dark,
coming to the larger water, there walking along the troughs
of waves folding in upon themselves; walking to an island,
small, narrow, sandy, sparsely wooded, in the middle
of the island in a clump of cedars a small spring
which I enter, sliding far down into a deep cool
dark endless weight of water.


Ghazal I

Unbind my hair, she says. The night is white and warm,
the snow on the mountains absorbing the moon.

We have to get there before the music begins, scattered,
elliptical, needing to be drawn together and sung.

They have dark green voices and listening, there are birds,
coal shovels, the glazed hysteria of the soon-to-be-dead.

I suspect Jesus will return and the surprise will be
fatal. I’ll ride the equator on a whale, a giraffe on land.

Even stone when inscribed bears the ecstatic. Pressed to
some new wall, ungiving, the screams become thinner.

Let us have the tambourine and guitars and forests, fruit,
and a new sun to guide us, a holy book, tracked in new blood.


Letters to Yesenin 1


This matted and glossy photo of Yesenin
bought at a Leningrad newsstand – permanently
tilted on my desk: he doesn’t stare at me
he stares at nothing; the difference between
a plane crash and a noose adds up to nothing.
And what can I do with heroes with my brain fixed
on so few of them? Again nothing. Regard his flat
magazine eyes with my half-cocked own, both
of us seeing nothing. In the vodka was nothing
and Isadora was nothing, the pistol waved
in New York was nothing, and that plank bridge
near your village home in Ryazan covered seven feet
of nothing, the clumsy noose that swung the tilted
body was nothing but a noose, a law of gravity
this seeking for the ground, a few feet of nothing
between shoes and the floor a light-year away.
So this is a song of Yesenin’s noose that came
to nothing, but did a good job as we say back home
where there’s nothing but snow. But I stood under
your balcony in St. Petersburg, yes St. Petersburg!
a crazed tourist with so much nothing in my heart
it wanted to implode. And I walked down to the Neva
embankment with a fine sleet falling and there was
finally something, a great river vastly flowing, flat
as your eyes; something to marry to my nothing heart
other than the poems you hurled into nothing those
years before the articulate noose.

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Copper Canyon Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2022
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1556596413
• ISBN 13: 9781556596414
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 944
• Redattore: Bednarik Joseph
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile