Songs of Unreason
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
#1 Poetry Foundation Bestseller
Michigan Notable Book
“A beautifully mysterious inquiry... Here Harrison—forthright, testy, funny, and profoundly discerning—a gruff romantic and a sage realist, tells tales about himself, from his dangerous obsession with Federico García Lorca to how he touched a bear’s head, reflects on his dance with the trickster age, and shares magnetizing visions of dogs, horses, birds, and rivers. Oscillating between drenching experience and intellectual musings, Harrison celebrates movement as the pulse of life, and art, which ‘scrubs the soul fresh.’” —Booklist
“Harrison has written a nearly pitch-perfect book of poems, shining with the elemental force of Neruda's Odes or Matisse's paper cutouts....In Songs of Unreason,, his finest book of verse, Harrison has stripped his voice to the bare essentials--to what must be said, and only what must be said." —The Wichita Eagle
“Songs of Unreason, Harrison’s latest collection of poetry, is a wonderful defense of the possibilities of living.… His are hard won lines, but never bitter, just broken in and thankful for the chance to have seen it all.” —The Industrial Worker Book Review
“Unlike many contemporary poets, Harrison is philosophical, but his philosophy is nature-based and idiosyncratic: ‘Much that you see/ isn’t with your eyes./ Throughout the body are eyes.’… As in all good poetry, Harrison’s lines linger to be ruminated upon a third or fourth time, with each new reading revealing more substance and raising more questions.” —Library Journal
“It wouldn’t be a Harrison collection without the poet, novelist, and food critic’s reverence for rivers, dogs, and women…his poems stun us simply, with the richness of the clarity, detail, and the immediacy of Harrison’s voice.” —Publishers Weekly
Jim Harrison's compelling and provocative Songs of Unreason explores what it means to inhabit the world in atavistic, primitive, and totemistic ways. "This can be disturbing to the learned," Harrison admits. Using interconnected suites, brief lyrics, and rollicking narratives, Harrison's passions and concerns—creeks, thickets, time's effervescence, familial love—emerge by turns painful and celebratory, localized and exiled.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It wouldn't be a Harrison collection without the poet, novelist, and food critic's reverence for rivers, dogs, and women, but that's not to say Harrison has grown stale or uninteresting in his late poems. Often, as in "A Part of My History," which finds the poet tracking the ghost of Garc a Lorca through Granada, his poems stun us simply, with the richness of the clarity, detail, and the immediacy of Harrison's voice. "We visited the site of the murder, drank a little wine," he writes, "and I stared at the Sierra Nevada/ glistening with snow that was somehow somber as/ the jewelry of the dead." Pushing his formal boundaries, Harrison closes the collection with the meditative "Suite of Unreason," a piece that boils down his sharp, epigrammatic lines into a sequence of fist-pumping short poems. But it also wouldn't be a Harrison poem without the hard melancholy that has come to define his voice. The beauty of Harrison's suite is that it allows the same voice that tells us "I will sing even with my tongue sliced/ into a fork" to tell us that "the sun forgot to rise/ and for a while no one noticed/ except a few farmers, who shot themselves."
