Earlier this week, I picked up a book of poems by Jim Harrison called Saving Daylight. Good friend of former Poet Laureate Ted Kooser (with whom he published a book of, shall we say, correspondence poetry entitled Braided Creek), Harrison is best known commercially for penning the novella Legends Of The Fall in 1979, from which he adapted the screenplay, and Hollywood added Brad Pitt in 1994.
Jim Harrison writes novels, essays, novellas, and screen plays, is a gourmet cook, a food critic, a zen practitioner, a naturalist and a sportsman, but first and foremost, he is a poet. Saving Daylight sees Jim contemplating time and nature, and the very nature of time. He writes with a blue collar on, and in the hand opposite his pen one would imagine a shovel, or a sledgehammer, or a shotgun.
The poems collected in Saving Daylight are colloquial and honest, pastoral and proud, mixed with equal parts salt and spit. Weathered, yet warm. When a line threatens to float from a poem on a white cloud of a daydream or a puff of nostalgia, it is grounded by a cinder block of a universal truth in the next.
Jim looks at a pocket watch, holds it up to the moon, and compares it.
Only he hears both of them tick.
From Adding It Up
Two nights ago I heard a woman from across
the creek, a voice I hadn’t heard since childhood.
I didn’t answer. Red was red this dawn
after a night of the swirling milk of stars
that came too close. I felt lucky not to die.
My brother died at high noon one day in Arkansas.
Divide your death by your life and you get
a circle, though I’m not so good at math.
This morning I sat in the dirt playing
with five cow dogs, giving out a full pail of biscuits.
