Braided Creek

April 1, 2003
Basing their recent correspondence entirely on poems shot back and forth from Jim Harrison's Montana and southern Arizona to Ted Kooser's Nebraska, the two poets have published the results in the epistolary collaboration Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry. The short, haiku-like poems, unattributed individually to either poet, admonish readers to "Look again: that's not/ a yellow oak leaf on the path,/ but the breastplate of a turtle."

May 15, 2003
Poetry is the most intimate form of writing, which may be why these two noteworthy authors have always included poems in their correspondence-an act that became all the more crucial when Kooser was diagnosed with cancer. These little gems prove that less is often more.

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2003
Friends and fellow poets Harrison and Kooser decided to have a correspondence entirely in short poems after Kooser was diagnosed with cancer and, Harrison says, "Ted's poetry became overwhelmingly vivid." The results of that decision are gathered here, and none of the two- to five-line writings is individually signed. Telling whose poem is whose is virtually impossible, and, not to gainsay Harrison, vividness, visual or tactile, takes second place to wit and wisdom in their colloquy. Both men are famous outlander poets, Harrison more the woodsman-hunter, perhaps, and Kooser the farmer-rancher, and their common basic concerns are land and water and animals, especially dogs and birds (when one is perforce in New York, "on a wet / and bitter street / I heard a crow from home"). They sound betimes like up-to-date imagists or haiku poets, pungent rural epigrammatists out of Jonathan Williams' "Blues & Roots, Rue & Bluets "(1971) and Wendell Berry's "Sayings & Doings "(1975), or just two crusty old codgers. Their conversation always repays eavesdropping. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)