[A couple of years ago] Letters to Yesinin, a minor masterpiece, was hardly noticed; it was minor because its mood was so thoroughly bleak that probably it could appeal to only a minor segment of sensibility. But it was magnificently written, and I hope somehow it will still find its proper audience. Harrison's new book, Returning to Earth, seems not quite so successful—perhaps because it is more low-keyed—but still notable. It is a loose sequence of poems and aperçus in which the poet gradually moves away from despair toward a tentative, tenuous acceptance of the natural world, his own world of farm and woodland in northern Michigan. Still, the old pain is dominant—alcoholism, a blind eye, sexual disillusionment, the wrack of the land. "At nineteen I began to degenerate," he writes, meaning, among other things, that then he discovered the degeneration of the world…. It is hard-boiled poetry, some of the best of its kind, and one is not surprised to know that Harrison has written very tough novels and many magazine pieces about sports and outdoor life. His poetic vision is at the heart of it all. To stay alive now is primitivism. And that is the hard best that we can know. (p. 87)