Margins
Gary Snyder book cover
Gary Snyder
Collected Poems
2022
First Published
4.63
Average Rating

Gary Snyder is one of America’s indispensable poets. Winner of the Pulitzer and Bollingen prizes, among many others, he is also the unofficial “poet laureate of deep ecology,” an influential seeker of alternatives to Western modes of living and thinking, and for many, a kind of personal sage, his poetry a species of wisdom literature. With this Library of America edition, Snyder’s poetry has been collected for the first time in a single, authoritative volume, prepared in close collaboration with the author. Here are all eleven books of poetry in their original order of publication, spanning the entire arc of his long career from Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (1959/1965) to This Present Moment (2016), along with many uncollected poems, drafts, fragments, and translations in newly authoritative texts reflecting Snyder’s corrections and revisions. Early works like Myths & Texts (1960), The Back Country (1968), and Regarding Wave (1970) reflect Snyder’s hardscrabble upbringing in the Pacific Northwest and his experience as a logger, fire-lookout, freighter crewman, and Buddhist initiate. They reveal an idiosyncratic and extraordinarily cosmopolitan imagination, one that found inspiration not only in the writings of Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg—contemporaries and friends with whom he is often linked—but also in East Asian literature and philosophy, indigenous North American myths and legends, and in the Western poetic tradition from Sappho and Ovid to Whitman and Pound. Snyder’s work at mid-career, most notably his Pulitzer Prize–winning Turtle Island (1974), reveals the impact of the Vietnam War and the burgeoning environmental movement, as he takes on a public, even hortatory voice, becoming a kind of elder statesman of the counterculture and spokesman for the natural world. Axe Handles (1983), Left Out in the Rain (1986), and new poems from No Nature (1992) present his spare and lyric reflections on mindfulness, family and community life, natural and karmic cycles, and mortality. Over forty years in the making and considered by many to be his masterpiece, his long poem Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) brilliantly distills and concentrates a lifetime’s themes; the autobiographical haibun of Danger on Peaks (2004) recall his youthful ascent of Mount St. Helens, seedbed for a series of reflections on disasters from Hiroshima to 9/11. Rounding out the volume is a selection of more than fifty rarities—from little magazines, chapbooks, broadsides, and rediscovered manuscripts—including nine poems published here for the first time.

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Author

Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder
Author · 29 books

Gary Snyder is an American poet (originally, often associated with the Beat Generation), essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Since the 1970s, he has frequently been described as the 'laureate of Deep Ecology'. From the 1950s on, he has published travel-journals and essays from time to time. His work in his various roles reflects his immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. Snyder has also translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese. As a social critic, Snyder has much in common with Lewis Mumford, Aldous Huxley, Karl Hess, Aldo Leopold, and Karl Polanyi. Snyder was for many years on the faculty of the University of California, Davis, and for a time served on the California Arts Council. ———————————————— Gary Snyder. (2007, October 19). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:36, October 19, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?t...

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