POETRY PICKS

JIM HARRISON: THE ESSENTIAL POEMS

Edited by Joseph Bednarik

Copper Canyon Press, 200 pages, $18

Jim Harrison had an appetite. He devoured the natural world with gusto and wrote about it with wild energy and sweetly caustic wit. He was a master of the) and a gourmand whose nonfiction books about eating () out-Bourdain Anthony Bourdain. Harrison was also a prodigious poet, and this thoughtfully curated collection showcases him at his best. Like his fiction, the poems observe the collision between civilization and the wildness outside our cities; they act like geocaches both harrowing and beautiful, as in this line from “Ghazals”: “When it rains I want to go north into the taiga, and before I freeze in the arid cold watch the reindeer watch the northern lights.” Organized chronologically, the material here becomes a time line distilling Harrison’s signature concerns.