Songs of Unreason is a collection of poems by American writer Jim Harrison published in 2011 by Copper Canyon Press.[1] It was Harrison's 13th and penultimate collection. 67 poems make up the collection, including "Suite of Unreason", a poem of over 350 lines, and a sequence of seven poems relating to rivers ("River I - VII"). Many of the poems are concerned with the transcendent natural world.[2]
Non-human creatures, especially dogs and birds, figure prominently in the poems. For example, in "Mary the Drug Addict" (about a dog named Mary), the poet speaks of the ability to communicate with his dog.
... we speak a bone-deep language without nouns and verbs, a creature-language skin to skin.
In the poem "Prado," which references dogs, birds and fish, the poet talks about the healing power of a relationship with animals:
I was lucky that early on the birds and fish disarmed me and the monster in my soul fled.
In "Chatter," the poet discusses his non-human nature:
I'm part blackbird and part red squirrel and my brain chatters, shrieks, and whistles but outside it tends to get real quiet
Death
A number of poems evaluate death: how we think about it, how we remember it, and how it affects us.[4] In “Sister,” Harrison remembers a sister who died long ago:
Maybe you drifted upward as an ancient bird hoping to nest on the moon.
In "River IV", the poet considers aging and death:
....At my age death stalks me but I don't mind. This is to be expected but how can I deal with the unpardonable crime of loneliness?...
The final poem, "Death Again", states:
Let's not get romantic or dismal about death. Indeed it's our most unique act along with birth. We must think of it as cooking breakfast, it's that ordinary....
Poems
Consisting of 67 short stanzas and over three hundred lines, "Suite of Unreason" is the longest poem in the collection. In the first edition, the stanzas of this poem are individually printed on unnumbered left-hand pages, opposite longer, stand-alone poems on the facing right-hand pages.
Harrison prefaced the poem as follows: "Nearly all my life I've noted that some of my thinking was atavistic, primitive, totemic. This can be disturbing to one fairly learned. In this suite I wanted to examine this phenomenon."[1]:4
The poem can be read as a series of short, haiku-like, meditations.[5][6] The first stanza of the poem is a good example:
The moon is under suspicion. Of what use is it? It exudes its white smoke of light.
List
The poems are numbered in the order they appear in the first edition of the collection.
Broom
Suite of Unreason
Notations
American Sermon
Arts
Bird's-Eye View
Poet Warning
A Part of My History
Muse in Our Time
Muse II
Poet at Nineteen in NYC
Sister
Skull
Horses
René Char
Xmas Cheeseburgers
Mary the Drug Addict
Night Creatures
Deaf Dog's Bark
June the Horse
Poet No. 7
Puzzle
Rumination
Dan's Bugs
Invisible
Mary
Remote Friends
Poet Science
Ache
Oriole
Blue Shawl
River I
River II
River III
River IV
River V
River VI
River VII
Spring
Sky
March in Patagonia, AZ
Brazil
Grand Marais
Desert Snow
Reality
She
Love
Back into Memory
Debtors
Prisoners
Corruption
Our Anniversary
Doors
Greed
Cereal
D.B.
Sunlight
Brutish
Nightfears
Blue
The Current Poor
Moping
Church
Chatter
Return
Prado
Death Again
Poems appearing elsewhere
"Blue" and "René Char II" (named after the French poet René Char) were included in New Poets of the American West.[7]
"A Puzzle", "She", and "Love" appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of the literary magazine Narrative.[8]
"Suite of Unreason" appeared in the Spring 2011 issue of Narrative.[9]
"Sunlight" was published in the Fall 2011 issue of Reflections (Yale Divinity School).[10]
"American Sermon" appeared in the Spring 2017 issue of Reflections (Yale Divinity School).[11]
↑ Brown, Fleda. "Michigan Writers on the Air: Commentaries on Poetry". Retrieved 2019-03-15. His collection before this one, Saving Daylight, is full of his usual rich conversation between the natural world—rivers and wolves and egg yolks, and the transcendence they contain. I'd say nothing has changed in the new book except that the light of awareness that's infused all of Harrison's work is brighter, here.
↑ Brown, Felda. "Michigan Writers on the Air: Commentaries on Poetry". Retrieved 2019-03-16. These little poems are very much like the ones in Braided Creek, the 2003 conversation in poems that Harrison and Ted Kooser wrote back and forth to each other. They're aphoristic, sometimes, and sometimes more like haiku. They mirror moment by moment the movement of the mind.
↑ Jaeger, Lowell (2010). New Poets of the American West (1sted.). Kalispell, Montana: Many Voices Press, Flathead Community College. ISBN9780979518546. OCLC660034027.
"American Sermon" in the periodical Reflections (Yale Divinity School)
"Sunlight" in the periodical Reflections (Yale Divinity School)
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