From Booklist
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. Ray Olson
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Book Description
Braided Creek contains more than 300 poems exchanged in this longstanding correspondence. Wise, wry, and penetrating, the poems touch upon numerous subjects, from the natural world to the nature of time. Harrison and Kooser decided to remain silent over who wrote which poem, allowing their voices, ideas, and images to swirl and merge into this remarkable suite of lyrics.Each time I go outside the worldis different. This has happened all my life. *The moon put her handover my mouth and told meto shut up and watch. *A nephew rubs the sore feetof his aunt, and the rope that lifts us all toward gracecreaks on the pulley. *Under the storyteller's hatare many heads, all troubled.Jim Harrison, one of America's best-loved writers, is author of two dozen books of poetry, fiction, essays, food criticism, and memoir. He is best known for a collection of novellas, Legends of the Fall, and the epic novel Dalva. He lives in western Montana and southern Arizona. Ted Kooser is the author of eight collections of poetry and a prose memoir. His poetry appears regularly in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Nation. He lives in Nebraska.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Longtime friends, Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser always exchanged poems in their letter writing. After Kooser diagnosed with cancer several years ago, Harrison found that his friend's poetry became "overwhelmingly vivid," and they began a correspondence comprised entirely of brief poems, "because that was the essence of what we wanted to say each other."" In these epigrammatic, aphoristic poems, two accomplished poets explore love and friendship and their passionate search for a little wisdom, pausing to celebrate the natural world, aging, everyday things and scenes, and poetry itself. When asked about attributions for the individual poems, one of them replied, "Everyone gets tired of this continuing cult of the personality...This book is an assertion in favor of poetry and against credentials."

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

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." Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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