The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry and Translations 1952-1998 - Hardcover

Snyder, Gary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1887178902 ISBN 13: 9781887178907

Publisher: Counterpoint, 1999

Synopsis

Gary Snyder has been a major cultural force in America for five decades?prize-winning poet, environmental activist, Zen Buddhist, earth-householder, and reluctant counterculture guru. Having expanded far beyond the Beat scene that first brought his work to the public ear and eye, Snyder has produced a broad-ranging body of work that encompasses his fluency in Eastern literature and culture, his commitment to the environment, and his concepts of humanity’s place in the cosmos.

Prose selections include journals from his travels to Saigon, Singapore, Kyoto, Ceylon, New Delhi, and Dharamshala; key interviews from the East West Journal and The Paris Review, meditations on Buddhism and the surrender of self; a cultural survey of communal living; and notes from the lookout tower on Sourdough Mountain, where in stark isolation Snyder once watched for forest fires.

The Reader gathers poems from each phase of Snyder’s long career?from his fist collection, Riprap, to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Turtle Island, through his epic poem cycle that was forty years in the making, Mountains and Rivers Without End.

From freighter to firetower, Zendo to Himalayan mountain ridge, Snyder’s writings reflect a lifetime of study, journey, and the practice of everyday mindfulness. Gary Snyder has witnessed and captured our culture at the hinge of change and?time and again?his work has transformed us just as it has altered our understanding of literature and place in a purposeful life.

About this title

About the Author

Gary Snyder has published sixteen books of poetry and prose. His book Turtle Island won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1975. Since 1970 he has lived with his family in the watershed of the South Yuba River, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Northern California.

From Booklist

Introducing this generous selection of the most appealing of the Beat writers, Jim Dodge says he changed his college major from fisheries management to "interdisciplinary studies, incorporating biology, English, and journalism" after reading Snyder's "Hay for the Horses." That early poem, from Riprap (1959), is Snyder's "Stopping By Woods" or "Richard Cory" --the one of his poems that, once read, is never forgotten, perhaps because, like Frost's and Robinson's chestnuts, it makes a statement about life's meaning, albeit a much more sanguine one than the great New Englanders' poems make. It appears in Dodge's remarks and again among the other poems in the collection. May it change other lives, though if one is resistant to poetry, there is twice as much of Snyder's prose here, concerned with nature, environmental consciousness, mythology, and, underlying it all, Buddhism, of which Snyder has long been a major practical Western exponent. Snyder is a man who lives healthily in the world, and any of his work is likely to change lives. Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1887178902
• ISBN 13: 9781887178907
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 617