SOURCE: “Eat Drink Man Woman,” in New York Times Book Review, January 3, 1999, p. 15.

In the following review, Veale favorably reviews The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems, stating that Harrison's poetry is graceful and in tune with nature.

Jim Harrison is best known for his novels and essays, but in the introduction to The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems he maintains that poetry “is the portion of my life that means the most to me.” In fact, Harrison has published nearly as many books of poetry as prose, from the youthfully expansive Plain Song (1965) to the Zen-inflected After Ikkyu (1996). This large collection, which also includes a new grab bag of nature verse and prose poems called “Geo-Bestiary,” has a meandering feel, although Harrison's concerns—aging, women, eating and drinking, hunting, the craft of writing and above all the spirit and rhythms of the...