We are all verbs in drag as nouns. Everything is. Stripping away this disguise, this delusion, freeing us to move, is a goal and task that runs all through his poetry. As his editor Joseph Bednarik observes in his prefatory note to the Complete Poems, among the most frequently used words in them are god, bird, and river. This holy trinity tends to show up in his work as incarnations or emblems of moments of freedom, awareness, full presence, vehicles of transformation-not so much transformation into something else but release into the ceaseless transformation of being. Or awakening to the true nature of being.
— Rebecca Solnit, from the intro to Jim Harrison’s, The Theory and Practice of Rivers