What do you think?
Rate this book
Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life
In honor of his 60th birthday (in 1990), the contributions of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Snyder to contemporary literature and thought are explored and celebrated in reminiscences and essays by writers and environmentalists including Ursula Le Guin, Wendell Berry, Allen Ginsberg, and Dave Foreman. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
451 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
1 person is currently reading
57 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 20, 2014
An interesting way to learn about a person's life, by reading short pieces by people who have known him. Gives a multi-faceted look. On the other hand, some of these contributors can't write well, and their pieces were painful to read.
April 18, 2020
This mostly magnificent collection of essays about or in some way related to Gary Snyder, his work and legacy, is hard to categorize.
I was kindly given a free signed copy of this book (actually an uncorrected proof edition) by a San Francisco bookseller I became friends with on ebay. I picked up this book thinking it was more-or-less a biography of the great man (one of my real heroes) but it is not. There are plenty of biographical details on Snyder throughout Dimensions of a Life, but it's more a collection of memoirs of Snyder from friends and family, fellow academics (such as the legendary Dell Hymes), fellow poets (such as Ginsberg and McClure), people inspired by his work (various anthropologists, poets, ecologists etc.) and the list goes on. The style of these essays and memoirs range from extremely informal to densely academic. A few of the essays were very 'cerebral' especially the ones related to anthropology and unless you are familiar with some of the terminology of that field, you will probably struggle with those essays as I did.
What emerges from the pages of this large book (my copy is about 526 pages) is a man not only deeply connected to the craft of poetry but also, and more importantly, deeply connected to his community (the Buddhist term 'sangha' is used throughout in this sense) and to the Earth. This book was published in the early 90s (around 91) and even back then, people were worried about the destruction of the environment (and rightfully so) but what would they think about our current state of affairs?
And this is why I was so glad, and felt so lucky, to pick up this volume right now, during these uncertain times. We are all heading towards possible oblivion with the risks of real ecological catastrophe not far off in the distance and it is a book like this which offers a very sobering reminder that humans need to wake up, get back in touch with nature (we are no longer in harmony with it, apart from a few notable exceptions here and there around the world) before it is too late.
Whenever you listen to the news these days, you will hear all the news about the Coronavirus epidemic and you are also likely to hear many economists talking about an economic recession or depression coming. And that is true. Those are serious problems that we will all soon have to face, in our own way and on our own terms, BUT this book reminds us that we have EVEN BIGGER more immediate and pressing problems on our hands. If the environment degrades to the point where we can no longer live here, then it's 'game over.' If the economy fails or breaks down, that would be a disaster but what can we do? We can start again. Rebuild our societies adopting different more sustainable models that are more sensible and more attuned to the needs of people (rather than just the 'elite') - such as an economy which avoids mass- and overproduction, meaningless materialist consumption and what one essayist calls in this book, "the dead repetitiveness of merely social acts." If we can't change our ways, then perhaps our future really is in space, if we could live there.
Being confined to home at the moment affords some time to think, to think about what kind of world we want to be living in, in future. What kind of world do we want to leave behind for our children and their children after them.............At this rate, we are going to leave behind a pretty shitty world.
However, one thing that struck me is that change is not going to come unless people at a community level get organized and start planning the types of lives THEY want to live, in a post-Corona decentralized society that moves away from freewheeling free market economies to something simpler and based on communal values rather than high-flying capitalist values such as "profit for the sake of profit."
What I have written above is simply a response to what I have read and absorbed.
You can find all of this and more in Dimensions of a Life.
Ultimately it comes down to a very simple decision for us human beings - economics or ecology?
Snyder sums this point up beautifully with one of his powerful maxims:
"True affluence is not needing anything."
What Snyder and other academics are suggesting is not a return to the 'ways of the caveman', not by a longshot. He's smarter than that - he knows that the way ahead lies in keeping the advances we have made in science but also not forgetting what our ancestors knew in the past (that we no longer know) to look for answers to our complex problems. What they are suggesting is something more viable and sustainable. Let's learn how to grow our own vegetables again, how to build things with our own hands, how to trade and share with people we know, and discard all the class-divided snobbishness that comes with living in contemporary middle-class society.
We should be planning for the next millenia, not for the next few years or even hundred years....that is to say if we care about our future descendents at all.
I was kindly given a free signed copy of this book (actually an uncorrected proof edition) by a San Francisco bookseller I became friends with on ebay. I picked up this book thinking it was more-or-less a biography of the great man (one of my real heroes) but it is not. There are plenty of biographical details on Snyder throughout Dimensions of a Life, but it's more a collection of memoirs of Snyder from friends and family, fellow academics (such as the legendary Dell Hymes), fellow poets (such as Ginsberg and McClure), people inspired by his work (various anthropologists, poets, ecologists etc.) and the list goes on. The style of these essays and memoirs range from extremely informal to densely academic. A few of the essays were very 'cerebral' especially the ones related to anthropology and unless you are familiar with some of the terminology of that field, you will probably struggle with those essays as I did.
What emerges from the pages of this large book (my copy is about 526 pages) is a man not only deeply connected to the craft of poetry but also, and more importantly, deeply connected to his community (the Buddhist term 'sangha' is used throughout in this sense) and to the Earth. This book was published in the early 90s (around 91) and even back then, people were worried about the destruction of the environment (and rightfully so) but what would they think about our current state of affairs?
And this is why I was so glad, and felt so lucky, to pick up this volume right now, during these uncertain times. We are all heading towards possible oblivion with the risks of real ecological catastrophe not far off in the distance and it is a book like this which offers a very sobering reminder that humans need to wake up, get back in touch with nature (we are no longer in harmony with it, apart from a few notable exceptions here and there around the world) before it is too late.
Whenever you listen to the news these days, you will hear all the news about the Coronavirus epidemic and you are also likely to hear many economists talking about an economic recession or depression coming. And that is true. Those are serious problems that we will all soon have to face, in our own way and on our own terms, BUT this book reminds us that we have EVEN BIGGER more immediate and pressing problems on our hands. If the environment degrades to the point where we can no longer live here, then it's 'game over.' If the economy fails or breaks down, that would be a disaster but what can we do? We can start again. Rebuild our societies adopting different more sustainable models that are more sensible and more attuned to the needs of people (rather than just the 'elite') - such as an economy which avoids mass- and overproduction, meaningless materialist consumption and what one essayist calls in this book, "the dead repetitiveness of merely social acts." If we can't change our ways, then perhaps our future really is in space, if we could live there.
Being confined to home at the moment affords some time to think, to think about what kind of world we want to be living in, in future. What kind of world do we want to leave behind for our children and their children after them.............At this rate, we are going to leave behind a pretty shitty world.
However, one thing that struck me is that change is not going to come unless people at a community level get organized and start planning the types of lives THEY want to live, in a post-Corona decentralized society that moves away from freewheeling free market economies to something simpler and based on communal values rather than high-flying capitalist values such as "profit for the sake of profit."
What I have written above is simply a response to what I have read and absorbed.
You can find all of this and more in Dimensions of a Life.
Ultimately it comes down to a very simple decision for us human beings - economics or ecology?
Snyder sums this point up beautifully with one of his powerful maxims:
"True affluence is not needing anything."
What Snyder and other academics are suggesting is not a return to the 'ways of the caveman', not by a longshot. He's smarter than that - he knows that the way ahead lies in keeping the advances we have made in science but also not forgetting what our ancestors knew in the past (that we no longer know) to look for answers to our complex problems. What they are suggesting is something more viable and sustainable. Let's learn how to grow our own vegetables again, how to build things with our own hands, how to trade and share with people we know, and discard all the class-divided snobbishness that comes with living in contemporary middle-class society.
We should be planning for the next millenia, not for the next few years or even hundred years....that is to say if we care about our future descendents at all.
August 3, 2025
This book is a collection of remembrances of Gary Snyder by a wide variety of his contemporaries. In the first sections, the recollections are organized roughly chronologically, but the latter group of portraits are more oriented around specific themes.
The remembrances vary tremendously in their quality, their focus, and their time-frames. A couple of them appeared to use Gary to talk about themselves instead, but overall they paint a picture of an extremely vibrant, socially- and ecologically-engaged truth seeker. There is a fair amount of repetitiveness in the essays, as these are all recalling the same individual, albeit through different stories and recollections.
I was ambivalent about whether this book would add to my appreciation of Snyder as a man or as a poet, but it absolutely did so. Snyder as a man, as a Zen adept, as an ecologist, and as a poet, comes through in these pages. He was an important person in our poetic and ecological history.
The remembrances vary tremendously in their quality, their focus, and their time-frames. A couple of them appeared to use Gary to talk about themselves instead, but overall they paint a picture of an extremely vibrant, socially- and ecologically-engaged truth seeker. There is a fair amount of repetitiveness in the essays, as these are all recalling the same individual, albeit through different stories and recollections.
I was ambivalent about whether this book would add to my appreciation of Snyder as a man or as a poet, but it absolutely did so. Snyder as a man, as a Zen adept, as an ecologist, and as a poet, comes through in these pages. He was an important person in our poetic and ecological history.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews