Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison are two of my favorite poets/writers and this volume reflects their talent and humanity.   The beautifully bound hard back volume was reissued this year on the 20th anniversary of its original publication.  It’s a wonderful book of poetry, reflecting both the individual genius of these two men and also their deep connection and friendship.

One of them was recovering from a serious illness when they began to exchange brief daily poems with no plan to organize and publish them. Eventually, they decided to do so with no attribution of the individual, haiku-like verses.  Hence, this 88 page compilation of poems, none longer than five lines and most ony two or three lines long.

Kooser and Harrison could not have been more different.  Kooser, in a brief afterword commented on the ‘unlikely pair’ observing that he was “sober, thin, anxious, a businessman-poet, the Stan Laurel of the two of us, and Jim was ‘The Jim’ from the top down, not sober, not thin, not anxious at all–a gruff, blustering, loveable Oliver Hardy.”   Despite, or because of those differences, they became good friends and exchanged these poems as well as another volume entitled ‘Winter Walks’ which Kooser wrote as daily postcard poems to Harrison while the former was recovering from cancer.

I have many favorites among them, but here’s a small taste of the riches of this volume:  “Today a pink rose in a vase/on the table./Tomorrow, petals.” : “I prefer the skyline/of a shelf of books.”; “It’s nice to think that when/we’re fossils we’ll all be in the same/thin layer of rock.”; “At the end, just a pinch of the world/is all we have left to hold on to,/the hem of a sheet.”; “Life has always yelled at me,/”Get your work done:”. At least/that’s what I think she says.”

You get the idea—fun, happy, melancholy, aging, death, loss—they’re all there in these jewels written by two talented friends.  Harrison died in 2016, a huge loss for literature.  If you don’t know his work beyond poetry, read his ‘Legends of the Fall’ and his two memoirs.  He was a big man who lived large.  I miss him. Kooser continues to work away in Nebraska and his recent book of poems, ‘Delights and Shadows’ was great!