The Theory and Practice of Rivers

by Jim Harrison

Overview

Filled with “moving water” and intuitive leaps, The Theory and Practice of Rivers is an elegy for Harrison’s sixteen-year-old niece.

This new edition of The Theory and Practice of Rivers, by Jim Harrison, returns to print—as a stand-alone volume—a classic poetry title. In a heartfelt and powerful introduction, Rebecca Solnit calls this collection both elegy (inspired by the death of his sixteen-year-old niece) and “loose memoir” (filled with language that leaps intuitively across subjects, recalling various experiences, place, and memories). Beautifully adrift in the long poem sequence seated at the heart of this book, The Theory and Practice of Rivers is filled with “moving water, the search for consolation and meaning in the sublime rightness of wild landscape” (Outside). Harrison speaks to the rivers and leaps in all of us, leaving us profoundly changed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556597138
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	05/20/2025
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jim Harrison (1937–2016) was the author of over three dozen books, including Legends of the Fall and Dalva, and served as the food columnist for the magazines Brick and Esquire. He published fourteen volumes of poetry, the final being Dead Man’s Float (2016). His work has been translated into two dozen languages and produced as four feature-length films. As a young poet he co-edited Sumac magazine with fellow poet Dan Gerber, and earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2007, he was elected into the Academy of American Arts and Letters. Regarding his most beloved art form, he wrote: “Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.” Jim Harrison certainly spoke the language.

Rebecca Solnit’s nonfiction is capacious and innovative. She has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Literary Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Most known for Orwell’s Roses, A Paradise Built in Hell, and Recollections of My Nonexistence, Solnit travels widely, sharing her original blends of memoir, scholarship, geography, and criticism. Her voice is singular and polyphonic, with the logistical talents of a prose writer and the concision of a lyric poet. She is an intersectional feminist and supports diverse causes, having founded Not Too Late, a climate project. An advocate of public education, she attended the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, and has lived as a journalist, historian, activist, and independent writer since 1988. A contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and a frequent writer for The Guardian and Literary Hub, she is based in San Francisco, California.

Editorial Reviews

Mourning the death of his 16-year-old niece, Gloria, to whom this work is dedicated, Harrison (Legends of the Fall; Dalva) here waxes more philosophical and romantic than in any of his previous poetry collections. His New Age ideology is problematic, however, in its attempts to combine primitive myths with a landscape he has absorbed firsthand. The natural world of northern Michigan reflected in the poems will be familiar to readers of Harrison's fiction, but the transformation of ordinary creatures into spiritual beings will ring false. The long title poem, comprising nearly half the book, is a rambling, often surrealistic meditation on the meaning of life and death, begging comparison to a river journey in which "how the water goes / is how the earth is shaped.'' Fragmented at best, this and other poems in the book's first section touch memories of people and rivers that fill the narrator's past, but do not adequately share these with the reader. Ten poems appearing in print for the first time, which end the collection, are less ambitious, but far more successful in exploring casual moments and conveying a sense of their importance. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The long title sequence of Harrison's seventh poetry collection is a journey upward from tragedy and unconsciousness, a fitful amalgam of memory and myth, meditation and nightmare, lucidity and delirium. It's the life-passing-before-one's-eyes at the precipice of death rendered in tranquility. In "trying to become alert enough to live,'' the narrator sinks and surfaces, clutching at vivid bits of psychic debris that collectively define "the longest journey taken in a split second.'' Harrison combines the rustic, the portentous, and the wry ("I had forgotten what it was I liked/ about life. I hear if you own a chimpanzee/ they cease at a point to be funny'') with mixed but often penetrating results. Spare, idiographic illustrations by Russell Chatham complement the poems. Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib.

Library Journal

Mr. Harrison’s novels and poems over the last two decades have been increasingly preoccupied with mortality, never so much as in Dead Man’s Float, his very good new book of verse. . . . The title of this volume, Dead Man’s Float, refers to a way to stay alive in the water when one has grown tired while far from shore. As a poet, however, Mr. Harrison is not passively drifting. He remains committed to language, and to what pleasures he can catch.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times

“[Harrison] equates writing poetry with creating cave paintings or petroglyphs, so intrinsically human is the urge to express the life of the soul, and his poems do make the temporal timeless.”—Booklist, STARRED review

“The way Harrison has embedded his entire vision of our predicament implicitly in the particulars of two poetic lives, his own and Yesenin’s, is what makes the poem not only his best but one of the best in the past twenty-five years of American writing. It does one of the things that art must do: unflinchingly, it gives us our own image, and it does so in superbly controlled and concise language.”—Hayden Carruth

“His poems stun us simply, with the richness of the clarity, detail, and the immediacy of Harrison’s voice.” —Publishers Weekly

“[A] fitful amalgam of memory and myth, meditation and nightmare, lucidity and delirium. . . . In ‘trying to become alert enough to live,’ the narrator sinks and surfaces, clutching at vivid bits of psychic debris that collectively define ‘the longest journey taken in a split second.’”—Fred Muratori, Library Journal

“His is a unique and original voice with no alliances to any school or system of writing. It is important that we have a poet today who understands the world the way he does. Harrison writes about the world of the shrinking outdoors and the world of urban decay and delivers both with wit and insight and gravity.”—Mark Hillringhouse, Literary Review

“While since 1971 much of Harrison’s energy has been consumed by his work as a novelist and screenwriter, he continues to write a poetry that defies current trends and conventions.” —Midwest Quarterl

“Harrison’s poetry is earthy in the fullest sense of the word: it is of the earth, stoked by the senses, in sync with the beat of life, and salty in its forthrightness. Harrison gleans lessons from rivers, the moon, birds, and dogs, and puzzles over the elusive nature of time, tagging clocks as ‘the machinery of dread’.” —Booklist

From the Publisher