In Search of Gmall Gods

by Jim Harrison

Hardcover, 2009

Status

Available

Tags

Publication

Port Townsend, Wash. : Copper Canyon Press, c2009.

Description

"Jim Harrison has probed the breadth of human appetites--for food and drink, for art, for sex, for violence and, most significantly, for the great twin engines of love and death. Perhaps no American writer better appreciates those myriad drives; since the publication of his first collection of poetry . . . Harrison has become their poet laureate."--Salon.com In Jim Harrison's new book of poems, birds and humans converse, biographies are fluid, and unknown gods flutter just out of sight. In terrains real and imagined--from remote canyons and anonymous thickets in the American West to secret basements in World War II Europe--Harrison calls his readers to live fully in a world where "Death steals everything except our stories."In Search of Small Gods is an urgent and imaginative book--one filled with "the spore of the gods." Maybe the problem is that I got involved with the wrong crowd of gods when I was seven. At first they weren't harmful and only showed themselves as fish, birds, especially herons and loons, turtles, a bobcat and a small bear, but not deer and rabbits who only offered themselves as food. And maybe I spent too much time inside the water of lakes and rivers. Underwater seemed like the safest church I could go to . . . Jim Harrison is the author of thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, includingLegends of the Fall andShape of the Journey. A long-time resident of Michigan, he now lives in Montana and Arizona.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member JBreedlove
The first book of poems (and short essays) by Jim Harrison. He's moved from Michigan to Montana but still as off hand and insightful. The book is more focused on time, being old, and death. He is fatalistic but it is an elegant fatalism. Looking forward to his other books of poetry.
LibraryThing member poetontheone
The poems in Jim Harrison's In Search of Small Gods contains a modest lechery and reflective cynicism that might resonate with readers of Bukowski or Tanizaki, but even moreso Harrison's poetry is rooted in his natural environment. We hear frequent mention of birds, dogs, insects, fish, and all
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manner of small gods. They are symbols that hold a subterranean meaning, often thunderous, that Harrison invokes in his inquiries and reflections on memory, mortality, and being-in-the world.
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Awards

Society of Midland Authors Award (Winner — Poetry — 2010)

Language

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