Gary Snyder: Essential Prose (Library of America, 391)

In one volume, the indispensable prose of our “poet laureate of deep ecology”

Here is Gary Snyder's own selection of his pathbreaking environmental essays, Buddhist journals, poetic notebooks, and more, including previously uncollected material

Gathered for the first time in a single volume and completing the definitive Library of America edition of his works, here is the essential prose of our “poet laureate of deep ecology”: philosophical essays, travel journals, poetic notebooks, reflections on Buddhism, environmental polemics, memoirs, speeches, interviews, letters, and other writings spanning the entire arc of Snyder’s lauded, seventy-year career. All of Snyder’s published prose collections are represented, omitting only items he feels are repetitious or merely occasional, followed by a selection of from his private journals. The volume includes:

• Earth House Hold: describing his life as a fire lookout in Washington State in the early 1950s, and his experiences as an initiate in a Kyoto monastery
• “Poetry and the Primitive," a kind of “ecological survival technique"
• “Buddhism and the Coming Revolution," which imagines the “nation-shaking implications” of spiritual discovery
• He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village, charting Snyder's deep engagements with Native American mythology
• Passage Through India: about a six-month pilgrimage with his wife and the poet Allen Ginsberg, culminating in a meeting with the Dalai Lama.
• The Practice of the Wild: a classic of American environmental writing in the tradition of Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Annie Dillard
• The essays in A Place in Space and Back on the Fire: exploring bioregionalism, forestry practices, sustainability, and the ecosystems of the Sierra Nevada, where Snyder has lived since 1970
• The Great Clod: a mediation on the intersections of nature and culture in Asian history and literature.  

It's all here, the profound reflections and inspiring meditations of our greatest living guide to the nature of meaning and the meaning of nature.

Born on May 8, 1930, in San Francisco, Gary Snyder grew up in the rural Pacific Northwest. He graduated from Reed College in 1951 with degrees in anthropology and literature, and later studied Japanese and Chinese civilization at Berkeley, returning there to teach in the English Department. After participating in the San Francisco revival, the beginning of the beat poetry movement, Snyder went to Japan in 1955 where he stayed for eighteen months, living in a Zen monastery. He has lived and written and worked in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada since 1969.

Jack Shoemaker is Founding Editor of Counterpoint Press, publishing the works of Wendell Berry, M.F.K. Fisher, Evan S. Connell, Robert Aitken, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and James Salter, among many others. He has worked with Snyder for over 50 years.

Kim Stanley Robinson has been called one of America’s “greatest living science fiction writers.” An avid Sierra Nevada backpacker, he counts Snyder as a longtime friend and major influence.