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Loading... Rain on the River: New and Selected Poems and Short Proseby Jim Dodge
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  railarson | Dec 28, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
While Jim Dodge is internationally known for his fiction, his first and abiding passion is poetry. After eighteen years of publishing anonymously and reading only to local crowds in the Pacific Northwest, he began to issue occasional limited-edition letterpress chapbooks with a small press, as well as occasional broadsides and, since 1987, a winter solstice poem or story, most given as gifts to friends. Rain on the River contains work collected here for the first time, as well as three dozen previously unpublished poems. Dodge's poems and short prose offer the same pleasures as his fiction -- a splendid ear for language, great emotional range and subtlety, a sharp eye for the illuminating detail, and a sensibility that encompasses outright hilarity, savage wit, and tender marvel, all made eminently accessible through writing of uncompromising clarity and grace. "Like being at a nonstop party in celebration of everything that matters." -- Thomas Pynchon "A rollicking, frequently surprising adventure-cum-fairy tale. It also has a sweetness about it and an indigenous American optimism." -- The New York Times Book Review "Diverse, savvy, passionate.... Poetry should be a pleasure, and Jim Dodge's work is just that." -- Gary Snyder No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.6)
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Wikipedia in English (1)
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If you are very lucky (and that person isn’t driven by ego or fanaticism) and you mentioned that you might be tempted to follow his or her example—that person would look at you like you were crazy then maybe laugh and try to talk you out of it. That person might even explain to you why you shouldn’t write in second person narrative.
For me that person was Jim Dodge. I had the extreme pleasure of taking a creative writing class with him at Humboldt State back in the early ’90s, and in retrospect, I should have dropped all my other classes and just hung out with him all day. Oh well, live and learn—which is also the message of much of Dodge’s output: any one of his three novels or the flurry of chapbooks and loose poems that follow in his literary wake will teach you that.
Rain on the River collects Dodge’s short-form musings from the late ’80s through when it was published in 2002, and during which time, Dodge married his long-time companion and became a father. Many of the later poems deal with the incredible sense of wonder he seemed to be dialed into at that point in his life.
Dodge’s poetry combines the wonder of some of Richard Brautigan’s more innocent works and the natural familiarity of Gary Snyder, a fellow traveler who Dodge attributes with changing the direction of his life. Dodge, an HSU fisheries major at the time, soon went multi-disciplinarian after reading Snyder’s Hay for the Horses.
Dodge’s mixture of Zen awareness and working class perception mirrors Snyder’s own sensibilities. In Fishing Devil’s Hole at the Peak of Spring, Dodge relates an archetypical steep downhill battle through briar and bramble (and occasional unexpected flower-strewn meadow) to reach a secret fishing hole, only to lose his fish and end up ass-over-tit in the freezing water to which he exclaims:
Yes. Yes by everything holy, yes!
Even better.
He writes at his most beatific in a bone-deep closing triptych/manifesto, Holy Shit.
I believe every atom of creation
is indelibly printed with divinity.
I believe in the warm peach
rolled in the palm of my hand.
I believe God plays saxophone
and the Holy Ghost loves to dance. (