[In the following review, Veale favorably reviews The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems, stating that Harrison's poetry is graceful and in tune with nature.]

Jim Harrison is best known for his novels and essays, but in the introduction to The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems he maintains that poetry “is the portion of my life that means the most to me.” In fact, Harrison has published nearly as many books of poetry as prose, from the youthfully expansive Plain Song (1965) to the Zen-inflected After Ikkyu (1996). This large collection, which also includes a new grab bag of nature verse and prose poems called “Geo-Bestiary,” has a meandering feel, although Harrison's concerns—aging, women, eating and drinking, hunting, the craft of writing and above all the spirit and rhythms of the natural world—are remarkably constant, as are his intentions: “In our poetry we want to rub our nose hard / into whatever is before it; to purge / these dreams of pictures, photos, phantom people.” His voice is obsessively unaffected and colloquial, which is surprising for someone so quick to acknowledge his lifelong debt to poets as diverse as Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Li Po and Keats, and who experiments with Buddhist-inspired verse and obscure poetic forms like ghazels. Harrison's writing is graceful, direct and muscular, even in those occasional places where the poems feel like dashed-off diary entries or, rarer still, when they hit a mawkish note. Much of the best verse—particularly the fine introspective reveries in The Theory and Practice of Rivers & New Poems—is set in rural Michigan, where Harrison is clearly most comfortable, pacing through the woods or confronting his appetites and his mortality: “It is not so much that I got / there from here, which is everyone's / story: but the shape / of the voyage, how it pushed / outward in every direction / until it stopped.” Throughout his wanderings he is great company—a restless, self-questioning, intelligent writer, humble before nature and above all grounded in the flesh and blood and feathers of the planet “A modern man, I do not make undue connections though my heart wrenches daily against the unknowable, almighty throb and heave of the universe against my skin that sings a song for which we haven't quite found the words.