This Present Moment

THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING POET

Gary Snyder offers over 35 poems inspired by his travels, career, and family—each showcasing the profound elegance and range that make him a legend of 20th-century American poetry.

This present moment
That lives on
To become
Long ago

In this stunning poetry collection, Gary Snyder finds himself ranging over the planet. From journeys to the Dolomites, to the north shore of Lake Tahoe; from Paris and Tuscany to the shrine at Delphi; from Santa Fe to Sella Pass, Snyder lays out these poems as a map of the last decade. Placed side–by–side, they become a path and a trail of complexity and lyrical regard, a sort of riprap of the poet’s eighth decade.

In the mix are some of the most beautiful domestic poems of his great career: poems about his work as a homesteader and householder, as a father and husband, as a friend and neighbor. A centerpiece in this collection is a long poem about the death of his beloved, Carole Koda, a rich poem of grief and sorrow, rare in its steady resolved focus on a dying wife, of a power unequaled in American poetry.

Gary Snyder is one of the greatest American poets of the last century, and This Present Moment shows his command, his broad range, and his remarkable courage.

“Each of the moments of these poems is completely open, even when . . . it resounds with deep personal emotion.” —Booklist

Gary Snyder is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry and prose. Since 1970 he has lived in the watershed of the South Yuba River in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, Snyder has also been awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry and the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award. His 1992 collection, No Nature, was a National Book Award finalist, and in 2008 he received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Snyder is a poet, environmentalist, educator and Zen Buddhist.