What do you think?
Rate this book
Understanding Gary Snyder
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 28, 2024
Overall, this is an excellent survey of Snyder's life and work up to the early 1990s. Yes, one of the only 'faults' of this book is it's now a little out of date as Snyder has done quite a bit since 1992, especially with the publication of The Gary Snyder Reader in the late 1990s, Danger on Peaks in the early 2000s, Back on the Fire, another collection of essays published around 2007 (or thereabouts) and the more recent but powerful collection of This Present Moment in 2015, not to mention the several collections of letters between Ginsberg and Snyder, Snyder and Martin, and Wendell Berry and Snyder, which shed more light on his day-to-day lifestyle and career as a poet. If this book were updated to include these and some of Snyder's other more recent works, it would represent one of the best guidebooks to his life and oeuvre.
The only other criticism I have of this book is that Murphy does not explore Snyder's "field-composition" poetics in great detail. He mentions it early on, and I was really keen to understand how this technique or approach worked in practice. My understanding of it is this: it's about how the poet arranges the words on the 'field' of the page, a bit like Kerouac's use of the spiral notebook for Mexico City Blues and similar to Olson's approach to writing in The Maximus Poems.
Apart from that, this is really a fantastic volume. First of all, while one could call this an 'academic' book, it is a true joy to read, having been written in easy, steady and measured prose. For me, the best takeaway of this book is Chapter 2 where Murphy devotes a whole chapter to a close almost line-by-line analysis of one of Snyder's more difficult but important works, Myths & Texts.
I have several heroes in this life - Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Blaze Foley, Piero Heliczer and Gary Snyder but after reading once again about Snyder's heroic ecoactivism, both through his writing and through his speeches and lectures, I would have to say that I admire him possibly more than any person on earth. If we had more people like Snyder in the world, advocating the common sense of bioregionalism and deep ecology, it most certainly would be a better place to live. Of that, I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever.
The only other criticism I have of this book is that Murphy does not explore Snyder's "field-composition" poetics in great detail. He mentions it early on, and I was really keen to understand how this technique or approach worked in practice. My understanding of it is this: it's about how the poet arranges the words on the 'field' of the page, a bit like Kerouac's use of the spiral notebook for Mexico City Blues and similar to Olson's approach to writing in The Maximus Poems.
Apart from that, this is really a fantastic volume. First of all, while one could call this an 'academic' book, it is a true joy to read, having been written in easy, steady and measured prose. For me, the best takeaway of this book is Chapter 2 where Murphy devotes a whole chapter to a close almost line-by-line analysis of one of Snyder's more difficult but important works, Myths & Texts.
I have several heroes in this life - Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Blaze Foley, Piero Heliczer and Gary Snyder but after reading once again about Snyder's heroic ecoactivism, both through his writing and through his speeches and lectures, I would have to say that I admire him possibly more than any person on earth. If we had more people like Snyder in the world, advocating the common sense of bioregionalism and deep ecology, it most certainly would be a better place to live. Of that, I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever.
Displaying 1 of 1 review