“Funny and tender beneath a wry and gruff seen-it-all veneer, Harrison contemplates death, discerns divinity in every stone and leaf, and nobility in ordinary lives, and laughs at our attempts to separate ourselves from the rest of nature.”–Booklist
“His poems succeed on the basis of an open heart and a still-ravenous appetite for life.”–The Texas Observer
Now in paperback, Jim Harrison’s best-selling poetry book In Search of Small Gods is where birds and humans converse, autobiographies are fluid, and unknown gods flutter just out of sight. In terrains real and imagined–from remote canyons and anonymous thickets in the American West to secret basements in World War II Europe–Harrison calls upon readers to live fully in a world where “Death steals everything except our stories.”
Maybe the problem is that I got involved with the wrong crowd of
gods when I was seven. At first they weren’t harmful and only showed
themselves as fish, birds, especially herons and loons, turtles, a bobcat
and a small bear, but not deer and rabbits who only offered themselves
as food. And maybe I spent too much time inside the water of
lakes and rivers. Underwater seemed like the safest church I could
go to . . .
Jim Harrison is one of America’s most versatile and celebrated writers. He is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including Legends of the Fall and Dalva. His work has been translated into two dozen languages. He lives in Arizona and Montana.
