SOURCE: A review of The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems, in World Literature Today, Vol. 73, No. 4, Autumn, 1999, p. 742.

In the following review, Oser describes his mixed feelings about Harrison's The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems. While he admires Harrison's wit and “warts and all” mentality, he finds fault with Harrison's technique and tendency to rant.

As a whopping book by an American poet, Jim Harrison's Shape of the Journey comes in the tradition of Leaves of Grass and The Cantos. In other words, you get the whole man here, blotches and brilliance, bathed in a kind of epic grandeur. And what Pound said of Whitman, we can generally say for Harrison: “He is America. … He is disgusting. He is an exceedingly nauseating pill, but he accomplishes his mission. … He is a genius because he has a vision of what he is and...