**The first collected edition of an essential, Pulitzer Prize-winning
Beat poet, the indispensable voice whose deep ecological vision and
Buddhist spirituality grows more relevant with each passing decade
**
Gary Snyder is one of America's indispensable poets, the "Thoreau of the
Beat Generation" and our "laureate of Deep Ecology." Now, for the first
time, all of Snyder's poetry is gathered in a single, authoritative
Library of America volume.
Here are all of Snyder's published books of poetry spanning a career of
almost seventy years. Early collections such as Riprap and Cold
Mountain Poems, Myths & Texts, and The Back Country
reflect his hardscrabble rural upbringing in the Pacific Northwest; his
life as a logger, fire-lookout, freighter crewman, carpenter, and
trail-blazer; his lifelong interest in Native American oral literatures;
and his pioneering studies of Zen Buddhism.
In Turtle Island and Axe Handles--the former a winner of the
Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and the latter the American Book Award in
1984--he explores countercultural alternatives to environmental and
spiritual decline and envisioning new forms of harmony with nature.
His epic Mountains and Rivers Without End, a poem four decades in
the making and regarded by many as his masterwork, is followed by
Danger on Peaks, and the intimate, preternaturally candid late
lyrics of This Present Moment, which meditate on his life as a
father, husband, friend, neighbor, and homesteader in the foothills of
California's Sierra Nevada, where he has lived since 1971.
The volume concludes with a generous selection, made by Snyder himself,
of previously uncollected poems from little magazines and broadsides;
translations from East Asian literatures; and drafts and fragments never
before published. Also included are explanatory notes, a detailed
chronology of Snyder's life, and an essay on textual selection.
