This new edition of Jim Harrison’s The Theory & Practice of Rivers returns to print as a celebratory, stand-alone volume. In her heartfelt and powerful introduction, Rebecca Solnit calls this collection both elegy (inspired by the death of Harrison’s sixteen-year-old niece) and “loose memoir” (filled with thought that leaps intuitively across subjects, recalling myriad experiences, places, and encounters). As Outside magazine put it, The Theory & Practice of Rivers is filled with “moving water, the search for consolation and meaning in the sublime rightness of wild landscape.” Anchored by a long poem sequence seated at its heart, this contemporary classic speaks to the rivers and cascades in all of us, the motion by which our lives are determined.
ISBN: 9781556597183
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9781556597138
Format: Hardcover
from “The Theory and Practice of Rivers”
Near the estuary north of Guilford
my brother recites the Episcopalian
burial service over his dead daughter.
Gloria, as in Gloria in Excelsis.
I cannot bear this passion and courage;
my eyes turn toward the swamp
and sea, so blurred they’ll never quite
clear themselves again. The inside of the eye,
vitreous humor, is the same pulp found
inside the squid. I can see Gloria
in the snow and in the water. She lives
in the snow and water and in my eyes.
This is a song for her.
