Lifetime.

Chris La Tray in worship of the "complete beauty" of Jim Harrison's complete poetic works ...

When the book arrives in the mail I stare at it for a time a little dumbfounded. It is gorgeous and it is massive. By the warm light of my desk lamp, the Russell Chatham painting used for the cover image — titled “Spring Moon Over the Marshall Ridge” — reflects, as in the golden light of sunset at the closing of one of those first, most beautiful days, a perfect, dream-like mood for what the book contains.

Painted in 2018, the landscape was certainly one of the great painter’s last works. Fitting, as Chatham’s work graced the covers of Jim Harrison’s books for decades and contribute in no small fashion to each one’s overall brilliance.

This is “Complete Poems” by Harrison. Assembled by his longtime poetry publisher, Copper Canyon Press, the tome collects all 14 of Harrison’s published books of poetry. It weighs over 3 pounds. Not counting end notes and index, etc., it comes in at 899 pages. It is not the kind of book one holds in a single hand, no matter how paw-like, while resting on one’s side on the bed or, as likely in my case, prone on the floor of my office.

The next day I carried it north with me to the Flathead Indian Reservation. I am teaching poetry to fourth- and fifth-graders there. At the beginning of each of four classes I held the book up for everyone to see. We passed it around so everyone could feel its heft, see the photo on the back cover of the grizzled poet, his eyes turned down, drawing on the ubiquitous cigarette. I described it as a physical representation of a life devoted to poetry and how wonderful that is. I was asked how long it will take me to read the whole thing. “A lifetime,” I answer.

I use examples from the book too. We are writing poems about place, and I open to a poem called “Portal, Arizona.” It is from “Saving Daylight” (2006). The opening line — “I’ve been apart too long / from this life we have” — sets me up, and as the poem closes: “What beauty / can I imagine beyond these vast rock walls / with caves sculpted by wind where perhaps / Geronimo slept quite innocent of television / and when his three-year-old son died | made a war these ravens still talk about,” I am rubble.

Harrison looms larger than life in my universe. I wouldn’t be here at this desk, writing these words, without the influence of his work. I picked up 2009’s “In Search of Small Gods” about the time it was published. I was already familiar with Harrison’s fiction and I wanted to try his poetry after reading that he identified as a poet over everything else. Sadly, like so many of us, until then poetry for me had been something I never gave much of a chance. I’d only seen it as an example of a high school torment in which I’d been forced to read only the most obtuse of poets writing in a language that seemed nothing akin to anything I’d ever understand. Why would I care?

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