adoption years before. Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at forty-five she has lived a life of lovers and adventures. Now, Dalva begins a journey that will take her back to the bosom of her family, to the half-Sioux lover of her youth, and to a pioneering great-grandfather whose journals recount the bloody annihilation of the Plains Indians. On the way, she discovers a story that stretches from East to West, from the Civil War to Wounded Knee and Vietnam -- and finds the balm to heal her wild and wounded soul.

As he did in the earlier book, the author passes the narrative baton from one character to another. There are five highly individual voices at work, including not only Dalva's own but that of her grandfather, mother, and son. This makes for a dense, Rashomon-like structure, in which events are revisited by one generation after another and truth is a relative thing--in every sense of the word. Harrison leavens this spiraling saga with splendid passages about everything from the Lakota Sioux to bird hunting, from the complexities of art to the simplicities of the wandering life: "There's a sweet, vaguely scary feeling in disappearance," notes Dalva's son, Nelse. And as always, the author can convey both the surprising beauty of a landscape and an almost suffocating sense of its abundance. "It is neither more nor less endurable in May," says Dalva of the lilac-encircled family cemetery, "when it is enshrouded by the heavy-scented purple and white flowers, a smell that on warm evenings is so dense as to be almost visible.... The sound of the crickets arrived one by one until they were a chorus, and if you walked down the gravel road toward the Niobrara the frogs from the lower, marshy areas were so loud as to be barely endurable." --Bob Brandeis

Braided Creek contains over 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 world
is different. This has happened
all my life.
*
The moon put her hand
over my mouth and told me
to shut up and watch.
*
A nephew rubs the sore feet
of his aunt,
and the rope that lifts us all toward grace
creaks on the pulley.
*
Under the storyteller's hat
are 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.

"Behind the words one always feels the presence of a passionate, exuberant man who is at the same time possessed of a quick, subtle intelligence and a deeply questioning attitude toward life. Harrison writes so winningly that one is simply content to be in the presence of a writer this vital, this large-spirited."-The New York Times Book Review

"(An) untrammelled renegade genius… here's a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language."-Publishers Weekly

"Readers can wander the woods of this collection for a lifetime and still be amazed at what they find."-Booklist (starred review.)

When the cloth edition of this book was first published, it immediately became one of Copper Canyon Press's all-time bestsellers. It was featured on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, became a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was selected as one of the "Top-Ten Books of 1998" by Booklist.

Jim Harrison is the author of twenty books, including Legends of the Fall and The Road Home. He has also written numerous screenplays and served as the food columnist for Esquire magazine. He lives in Michigan and Arizona.

Dead Deer

Amid pale green milkweed, wild clover,
a rotted deer
curled, shaglike,
after a winter so cold
the trees split open.
I think she couldn't keep up with
the others (they had no place
to go) and her food,
frozen grass and twigs,<B

"One is simply content to be in the presence of a writer this vital, this large-spirited."-The New York Times Book Review

Although best known for his acclaimed fiction, Jim Harrison's poetry has earned him recognition as an "untrammeled renegade genius." Saving Daylight, his tenth collection of poetry–and first in a decade–is grounded in thickets and rivers, birds and bears, and the solace of dogs in a crazed political world. Whether contemplating the ephemerality of 90,000,000,000 galaxies or the immediate grace of a waitress, Harrison relishes the art and mysteries of being alive. "I'm enrolled in a school without visible teachers," he writes in the title poem, "the divine mumbling just out of ear shot."

From "The Little Appearances of God"

When god visits us he sleeps
without a clock in empty bird nests.
He likes the view. Not too high.
Not too low. He winks a friendly wink
at a nearby possum who sniffs the air
unable to detect the scent
of this not quite visible stranger...

Jim Harrison is the author of two dozen books, including Legends of the Fall and Dalva. His work has been translated into 20 languages and produced as four feature-length films. Mr. Harrison divides his time between Montana and southern Arizona.

In Jim Harrison's new book of poems, birds and humans converse, biographies are fluid, and unknown gods flutter just out of sight. In terrains real and imagined-from remote canyons and anonymous thickets in the American West to secret basements in World War II Europe-Harrison calls his readers to live fully in a world where "Death steals everything except our stories." In Search of Small Gods is an urgent and imaginative book-one filled with "the spore of the gods."

Maybe the problem is that I got involved with the wrong crowd of gods when I was seven. At first they weren't harmful and only showed themselves as fish, birds, especially herons and loons, turtles, a bobcat and a small bear, but not deer and rabbits who only offered themselves as food. And maybe I spent too much time inside the water of lakes and rivers. Underwater seemed like the safest church I could go to . . .

Jim Harrison is the author of thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including Legends of the Fall and Shape of the Journey. A long-time resident of Michigan, he now lives in Montana and Arizona.

Photographer Wyatt McSpadden has spent some twenty years documenting barbecue--specifically, the authentic family-owned cafes that are small-town mainstays. Traveling tens of thousands of miles, McSpadden has crisscrossed the state to visit scores of barbecue purveyors, from fabled sites like Kreuz's in Lockhart to remote spots like the Lazy H Smokehouse in Kirbyville. Color or black-and-white, wide angle or close up, his pictures convey the tradition and charm of barbecue. They allow the viewer to experience each place through all five senses. The shots of cooking meat and spiraling smoke make taste and smell almost tangible. McSpadden also captures the shabby appeal of the joints themselves, from huge, concrete-floored dining halls to tiny, un-air-conditioned shacks. Most of all, McSpadden conveys the primal physicality of barbecue--the heat of fire, the heft of meat, the slickness of juices--and also records ubiquitous touches such as ancient scarred carving blocks, torn screen doors and peeling linoleum, and toothpicks in a recycled pepper sauce jar.

L'écrivain Jim Harrison signe un texte qui dénonce violemment l'oubli et la non-reconnaissance des massacres des Indiens par les États-Unis et cite Brecht : "Celui que tu veux détruire, commence par le faire passer pour un sauvage." Un livre d'images engagé, un hommage à la mémoire de tous les peuples indiens. --Sylvie Lécallier