Saving Daylight - Softcover

Harrison, Jim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556592671 ISBN 13: 9781556592676

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2007

Synopsis

Named to the Notable Books of the Year lists from The Kansas City Star and the Michigan Library Association.

“Jim Harrison is a writer with immortality in him.”—The Times (London)

“This is [Harrison’s] most robust, sure-footed, and blood-raising poetry collection to date.”—Booklist

Jim Harrison—one of America’s most beloved writers—calls his poetry “the true bones of my life.” Although he is best known as a fiction writer, it is as a poet that Publishers Weekly famously called him an “untrammeled renegade genius.”

Saving Daylight, Harrison’s tenth collection of poetry, is his first book of new poems in a decade. All of Harrison’s abundant passions for life are poured into suites, prose poems, letter-poems, and even lyrics for a mariachi band.

The subjects and concerns are wide-ranging—from the heart-rending “Livingston Suite,” where a boy drowns in the local river and the body is discovered by the poet’s wife—to some of the most harrowing political poems of Harrison’s career. There is also a cast of creature characters—bears, dogs, birds, fish—as well as the woodlands, thickets, and occasional cities of Arizona, Montana, Michigan, France, and Mexico.

“Imagination is my only possession,” Harrison once said. And Saving Daylight is an imagination in full, exuberant bloom.

Jim Harrison is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. His work has been translated into dozens of languages. Born and raised in Michigan, he now lives in Montana and Arizona.

About this title

About the Author

Jim Harrison is the author of thirty books, including Legends of the Fall, Dalva, and Shape of the Journey. His work has been translated into two dozen languages and produced as four feature-length films. In 2007, Mr. Harrison was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He divides his time between Montana and southern Arizona.

From Booklist

Harrison's poetry is earthy in the fullest sense of the word: it is of the earth, stoked by the senses, in sync with the beat of life, and salty in its forthrightness. Harrison gleans lessons from rivers, the moon, birds, and dogs, and puzzles over the elusive nature of time, tagging clocks as "the machinery of dread." He writes sharply of war, the "loathsome" government, the distortions of religion, and humankind's "will toward greed and self-destruction." A veteran fiction writer, Hollywood darling, hard-living and deep-thinking poet, Harrison brings tough love to the puzzles of existence and a meditative perspective to life's mysteries as he evokes the wilds of Montana and cherished small towns. He remembers the dead, savors life's bittersweetness, its push and pull, its "swish and swash," and knows in his very cells that "salvation isn't coming. It's always been here." Harrison may be under doctor's orders to count his drinks and measure the sugar in his blood, but this is his most robust, sure-footed, and spirit-raising poetry collection to date. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1556592671
• ISBN 13: 9781556592676
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 124