The Theory & Practice of Rivers [signed] [first edition]

The long title sequence of Harrison's seventh poetry collection is a journey upward from tragedy and unconsciousness, a fitful amalgam of memory and myth, meditation and nightmare, lucidity and delirium. It's the life-passing-before-one's-eyes at the precipice of death rendered in tranquility. In "trying to become alert enough to live," the narrator sinks and surfaces, clutching at vivid bits of psychic debris that collectively define "the longest journey taken in a split second." Harrison combines the rustic, the portentous, and the wry ("I had forgotten what it was I liked/ about life. I hear if you own a chimpanzee/ they cease at a point to be funny") with mixed but often penetrating results. Spare, idiographic illustrations by Russell Chatham complement the poems. Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib.Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.