Rain on the River: Selected Poems and Short Prose

by Jim Dodge

Overview

While Jim Dodge is internationally known for his fiction, his first and abiding passion is poetry. After eighteen years of publishing anonymously and reading only to local crowds in the Pacific Northwest, he began to issue occasional limited-edition letterpress chapbooks with a small press, as well as occasional broadsides and, since 1987, a winter solstice poem or story, most given as gifts to friends. Rain on the River contains work collected here for the first time, as well as three dozen previously unpublished poems. Dodge's poems and short prose offer the same pleasures as his fiction — a splendid ear for language, great emotional range and subtlety, a sharp eye for the illuminating detail, and a sensibility that encompasses outright hilarity, savage wit, and tender marvel, all made eminently accessible through writing of uncompromising clarity and grace. "Like being at a nonstop party in celebration of everything that matters." — Thomas Pynchon "A rollicking, frequently surprising adventure-cum-fairy tale. It also has a sweetness about it and an indigenous American optimism." — The New York Times Book Review "Diverse, savvy, passionate.... Poetry should be a pleasure, and Jim Dodge's work is just that." — Gary Snyder

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802138965
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	04/15/2002
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

	Notes and Acknowledgments	XI
	Selected Poems and Short Prose
	Learning to Talk	3
	The Cookie Jar	4
	Things Thought Through	7
	On Balance	8
	Decomposition	9
	Psycho Ecology	10
	Life of the Spirit	11
	Aweigh	12
	Tao-to-Tao	16
	To Be	17
	Practice, Practice, Practice	19
	Wisdom and Happiness	20
	Red Sails	22
	Squall & Commotion	23
	Slow Learner	24
	Bathing Joe	25
	Mahogany China	30
	The First Cut Is the Deepest	31
	Waiting for Houdini to Come Up	32
	The Countessa	33
	Venison Stew	35
	Winter Song	37
	On Humor: On Mating Donkeys and Onions	38
	Watering the Garden on the Hottest Day of the Summer	39
	Palms to the Moon	40
	A Firmer Grasp of the Obvious	41
	The Work of Art	42
	Steelhead Fishing, Smith River, January	43
	The Third Bank of the River	45
	Green Side Up	46
	One Thing After Another	47
	Unnatural Selections: A Meditation upon Witnessing a Bullfrog Fucking a Rock	48
	Fishing Devil's Hole at the Peak of Spring	51
	Getting After It	55
	How to Catch the Biggest Fish	56
	Hard Work	57
	There It Is	58
	Knowing When to Stop	59
	Vacation Expenses	60
	Basic Precepts and Avuncular Advice for Young Men	61
	Killing	62
	Death and Dying	63
	New Poems and Short Prose
	The Banker	67
	The Real Last Words of Billy the Kid	69
	The Moving Part of Motion	71
	How About	72
	Necessary Angels	75
	Prayer Bones	76
	Magic and Beauty	78
	Day Moon	80
	Karma Bird	81
	The Tunnel	82
	Hagerty Wrecks Another Company Truck	84
	Obsession	85
	Love Find	86
	Flux	87
	Thanks for the Dance	88
	The Stone	89
	Woman in a Room Full of Rubber Numbers	90
	Reason to Live	91
	Scratch	92
	Salvage	93
	An Epithalamium for Victoria	95
	Falling into Place	97
	Play-By-Play	98
	Job Application	99
	The Mouth of the River	100
	The Prior and Subsequent Heavens	101
	Old Growth	103
	Three Ways to Get the Carrot on the Stick	107
	Eurydice Ascending	108
	The Drought of '76	110
	True Account of the Saucer People	111
	About time	112
	Smithereens	118
	Jack o' Hearts Shopping Mortmart	119
	Holy Shit	120