Workman.

Jim Harrison is one of our finest young poets. He has a racy Michigan lingo (backwoods-wry-huntin' and fishin'-dirty-gone to hell) that he mingles a little too readily with notes from the high lyric tradition. He is relentlessly hard on himself: his past life, his present plights, his character in general. But he redeems the poems from grimness by a buffoonery of anguish and by something else that is more elusive.

The something else is an open, volatile atmosphere. It involves a sense of comic slovenliness originating in the self-ironies of folkspeech and unexpectedly convertible into an almost physical precision, that of a workman who knows just how to use his tools. I don't want to make too much of the point, but it just may be that Jim Harrison, in spite of—perhaps even by way of—Apollinaire and all the other literary influences he is assimilating, has a good deal to show us about the psychic landscape of working-class American life.

Read this and more criticism of Jim Harrison's early work here.