Dead Man’s Float, Jim Harrison, 2016 

Another beautiful volume of poetry from one of America’s most prolific artists.  At 75, Harrison continues to focus on his themes of nature, man’s negative impact on it despite his smallness in the universe, and his aging body and brief period remaining.  The man who drank, ate, and lived fully is now more reflective, dwelling on the beautiful natural world of mountains, rivers, stars, the moon, small birds and apple trees in his homes in Arizona and Montana.  He pays tribute to his dead poet heroes:  Mandelstam, Lorca, Machado, Keats, and the painter Caravaggio.  He relives ecstatic moments from his youth and looks towards the future:  “I’m thinking of the future and the past,/ and how the past at my age has become/ obviously so much longer than the future.”  As with so many aging poets, memory is a major theme as in the prose poem, Round:  “The soft brain has its own improbable life containing galaxies, tens of thousands of people met, the microcosm of life in one place and on the diaphanous and often filthy cloth of memory, hanging there and battered on the clothesline in so many year of bad weather, wet and stiff with ice or blasted by sun and heat, part of it in shreds.”   Much, much more to quote, but time and space move on.