A Minnesota poet's appreciation for 'Legends of the Fall' author Jim Harrison

Back in the mid-'70s, when my "office" was the Minneapolis Central Library, I noticed a novel on display — "Farmer," by Jim Harrison. I was attracted because the setting was Michigan, a rare novel of the Upper Midwest at the time. That began my 40-year love affair with Harrison's writing.

He became the American master of the novella — most famously "Legends of the Fall," a Brad Pitt film vehicle, but also many others. They had titles like poems: "The Woman Lit by Fireflies." "The Beast God Forgot to Invent."

Harrison, who died March 26 in Arizona, grew up in Michigan, and most of his exuberant stories and poems are set among the forests, rivers and tree stumps where he often sat for hours to orient himself in their company.

I recall two conclusions from his marvelous autobiography, "Off to the Side." His self-assessment of his success, although he didn't call it that, was his "prodigious" capacity for work. After he moved to Hollywood (where he made the money that fiction and poetry never paid), producers said they invited him not because he made great stories, but great characters.

So true. Among the most memorable is his recurring character Brown Dog, an amoral hilarity of inadvertence, appetite and tender heart.

Two facets of Harrison are generally underappreciated in the whirlwind of his very public gourmand enthusiasms. First, his women. In spite of his regular attendance at girlie shows and his overt delight in women's "bottoms," his female characters are usually the sharper knives, smarter and more humane than the men, who are often appetite-driven animals or exploiters wounded by dissipation of fortunes from North Country mining and forests.

Second, his poetry. Poems flowed from him fast as the rivers of his robust prose, but banked by his deep knowledge and respect for Zen poetry practice and tradition.

Just last week I bought Harrison's two newest books, "The Ancient Minstrel" (three novellas) and "Dead Man's Float" (poems). I look forward to more astounding characters from Harrison's imagination, his muscular sentences and — are you ready? — his delicate sensibilities for women and the land he called home.

As his life ended, it must be said, and he would agree, that he had in his wife one of the great partners in a writer's life. She bore his children, his eccentricities, depressions, obsessions, his long absences and who knows what else with a steadfast heart. Thanks to her, readers have a long shelf of some of the most memorable sentences and characters in modern fiction and poems that, like his beloved landscapes, will endure.