Jim Harrison: Collected Ghazals

Product Description

“This collection arrives from the spirit world buoyant, its rowdy soul intact.”― Raúl Niño, Booklist

The ghazal, a poetic form rooted in seventh century Arabia, became popular in the United States through the translations of Rumi, Hafiz, and Ghalib. As a young poet, Jim Harrison became enamored with ghazals, and while he ignored most of the formal rules, within the energized couplets he discovered a welcome vehicle for his driving passions, muscular genius, and wrecking-ball rages. The year Outlyer & Ghazals appeared,
The New York Times honored the book with inclusion on their coveted “Noteworthy Titles” list, provocatively noting that these poems were “worth loving, hating, and fighting over.”
Collected Ghazals gathers all of Harrisons’s published ghazals into a single volume, accompanied by an “Afterword” by poet and noted ghazal writer Denver Butson, who writes that with this collection, Harrison’s ghazals “are ours to witness again in all their messy, brave, honest, grieving, lustful, longing humanity.”

“These are raucous, boozy, at times sexually explicit journeys beyond standard forms, often expressing a young poet’s exuberance. Harrison wills us to follow him: ‘When I slept in the woods I awoke before dawn / and drank brandy and listened to the birds until the moon / disappeared.’ Closing with an illuminating afterword by poet Denver Butson, this collection arrives from the spirit world buoyant, its rowdy soul intact.”―
Booklist

About the Author

Jim Harrison (1937-2016) was one of America’s most celebrated writers, publishing nearly forty books across multiple genres―fiction, essay and memoir―and he also wrote screenplays and popular food columns for
Esquire and
Brick. He is credited for revitalizing the novella form with the publication of his best-selling trilogy
Legends of the Fall. In 2007 he was elected to the Academy of Arts and Letters. Harrison died at his writing desk in 2016, only a few months after the publication of his final book of poems,
Dead Man’s Float.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

XIX

We were much saddened by Bill Knott’s death.
When he reemerged as a hospital orderly we were encouraged.

Sad thoughts of different cuts of meat and how I own no
cattle and am not a rancher with a freezer full of prime beef.

A pure plump dove sits on the wire as if two wings emerged
from a russet pear, head tucked into the sleeping fruit.

Your new romance is full of nails hidden from the saw’s teeth,
a board under which a coral snake waits for a child’s hand.

I don’t want to die in a foreign land and was only in one
once, England, where I felt near death in the Cotswolds.

The cattle walked in the shallow water and birds flew
behind them to feed on the disturbed insects.

XXX

I am walked on a leash by my dog and am water
only to be crossed by a bridge. Dog and bridge.

An ear not owned by a face, an egg without a yolk
and my mother without a rooster. Not to have been.

London has no bees and it is bee time. No hounds
in the orchard, no small craft warnings or sailing ships.

In how many poems through how many innocent branches
has the moon peeked without being round.

This song is for New York City who peeled me like
an apple, the fat off the lamb, raw and coreless.

XXXVII

Who could knock at this door left open, repeat
this after me and fold it over as an endless sheet.

I love or I am a pig which perhaps I should be,
a poisoned ham in the dining room of Congress.

Not to kill but to infect with mercy. You are known
finally by what magazines you read in whose toilet.

I’ll never be a cocksman or even a butterfly. The one
because I am the other, and the other, the other one.

This is the one song sung loud though in code: I love.
A lunepig shot with fatal poison, butterfly, no one.