Dead Man’s Float by Jim Harrison (review)

Jim Harrison passed away in 2016, a few months after releasing his final collection of poetry, Dead Man’s Float. Of this art form Harrison said, “Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.” Drawing upon the rivers, mountains, and wildlife of Montana, Arizona, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the poems in Dead Man’s Float illustrate a landscape of broad vistas and correspondingly, of broad spirit.

The pleasure of reading Dead Man’s Float arises from Harrison’s ability to render the intensity with which he lived his life with a surfeit of sensory details. His existence was one of rigorous physicality and elemental actions: walking, fishing, hunting, eating, and loving. Ironically, when writing about actions that sustain life, Harrison emerges as a figure larger than life. He recognizes that many people suffer from Thoreau’s claim that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” and Harrison’s poems reflect a determination to exist outside of this mass, even as age and infirmity challenge his abilities to do so.

The book begins with a semi-autobiographical, three-page prose piece entitled “Hospital,” in which the speaker lies debilitated by shingles and spinal surgery. The speaker describes the operation in a blunt, visceral, yet tender style typical of the collection: “Tomorrow they will cut me from neck bone to tailbone to correct my mysterious imperfections that keep me from walking. I want to walk like other kids in the fields with my noble dog.” His body immobile, the speaker describes himself as “an artful sewage system,” and in another poem, “Solstice Litany,” soberly concludes: “I’m just human. All too human.”

This unsentimental view of the human condition often evolves into a self-chastising humility. In “Solstice Litany,” the speaker witnesses a tamarack struck by lightning “burst into flame,” and he “[goes] into the cabin feeling unworthy. / At dawn the tree is still smoldering / in this place the gods touched earth.” A later poem entitled “Vows” begins “I feel my failure intensely / as if it were a vital organ / the gods grew from the side of my head.” Often, Harrison’s speakers feel their insignificance in relationship to the natural world or the universe; however, while they do not experience the Emersonian transcendence of becoming “part or particle of God,” these poems show that the earth regularly exhibits phenomena both awesome and mysterious. When we are observant of and receptive to these phenomena, Harrison suggests, they can heal the soul debilitated by the material world or the exhausting and exasperating routines of daily life.

In the poem “Spirit,” he begins this healing process:

Rumi advised me to keep my spirit up in the branches of a tree and not peek out too far, so I keep mine in the very tall willows along the irrigation ditch out back, a safe place to remain unspoiled by the filthy culture of greed…

In “Another Country,” the speaker praises a place of “raw moist dawns with / a thousand birds you hear but can’t / quite see in the mist.” The title’s metaphor suggests that this “country,” though foreign to the speaker’s “old alien body,” is not beyond the human realm. At the call of a loon the speaker experiences a frisson, a brief physiological ecstasy that causes a welcomed disorientation: “Back at the cabin I see a book / and am not quite sure what that is.” The book, a monosyllabic man-made object, pointedly connotes the intellectual versus the visceral, the scripted versus the spontaneous.

The “all too human” Harrison does not apotheosize these interactions with the natural world, but rather exalts them in a quiet way. In the poem “Zona,” another name for the disease “shingles,” the speaker counters the burning pain and his impending death (“Time rushes toward me”) with an outlook both elemental and immediate: “Still, / the radishes are good this year. Run them through butter, / add a little salt.” Though many of the poems are triggered by the speaker’s mortality...