[In the following review, Oser describes his mixed feelings about Harrison's The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems. While he admires Harrison's wit and “warts and all” mentality, he finds fault with Harrison's technique and tendency to rant.]

As a whopping book by an American poet, Jim Harrison's Shape of the Journey comes in the tradition of Leaves of Grass and The Cantos. In other words, you get the whole man here, blotches and brilliance, bathed in a kind of epic grandeur. And what Pound said of Whitman, we can generally say for Harrison: “He is America. … He is disgusting. He is an exceedingly nauseating pill, but he accomplishes his mission. … He is a genius because he has a vision of what he is and of his function.” Whitman and Pound and Harrison are not only heirs of the ages; they are rebels against American Calvinism.

I respect any author who can mine his world for gold. Still, my response to this collection is ambivalence. It was probably a hankering after completeness that led Harrison to include his first, very voting book, 1965's Plain Song. For this reader, the influence of Robert Bly on the early Harrison dates him—like an echoey sound-effect on a 1960s record. Generation-Xers might even derive a kitschy pleasure from the long dinosaur-jam or sequences that typify Harrison's early writing.

Alongside Adrienne Rich, the protest-era Harrison experiments with ghazals. As in Rich's case, the experiment yields mixed results. Many of the ghazala feature an interesting surrealism, or reflect curious reading in anthropology. But you cannot adopt a challenging Middle Eastern form by jettisoning the hard parts. Unlike Harrison, I hesitate to defend associate leaps of thought in terms of organic form: the associations can be mechanical or clever, But the first few books offer many accurate and useful writings on the northern Michigan landscape, riot without inspired turns of phrase.

At his best, the later Harrison is a formidable wit, a Zen rambling man capable of fabulous drolleries and vertiginous shifts of perspective. There is, moreover, considerable thoughtfulness and religious feeling in the recent poetry, as in the opening stanza of the sequence “After Ikkyu” (named after the fifteenth-century Zen master of the Rinzai school in Japan): “Our minds buzz like bees / but not the bees' minds. / It's just wings not heart / they say, moving to another flower.” Detecting a hint of moral allegory in these rich verses, I begin to suspect that Harrison owes a debt to his Calvinist past. We read him, much as we read Gary Snyder, by shuttling between East and West.

The Shape of the Journey has two important defects. First, it rants. Harrison has a penchant for facile dichotomies (good writers versus evil politicians, pure Indians versus corrupt whites). This depressing Manichean strain allows him to shake his fist at civilization while partaking of its best fruits: he is yet another high-maintenance rebel. Second, I am not satisfied with Harrison from a technical standpoint. With respect to technique, his best poem is probably “The Theory and Practice of Rivers” (indeed a good poem). Here, for sustained passages, we find noble accents and an arresting rhythmical texture. I would grant that Harrison gets the form right in his more deeply meditative poems. Too often, though, he shuns formal constraints, and makes things rather too easy for himself.