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Gary Snyder: Collected Poems
Gary Snyder is one of America’s indispensable poets. Winner of the Pulitzer and Bollingen prizes, among many others, he is also the unofficial “poet laureate of deep ecology,” an influential seeker of alternatives to Western modes of living and thinking, and for many, a kind of personal sage, his poetry a species of wisdom literature. With this Library of America edition, Snyder’s poetry has been collected for the first time in a single, authoritative volume, prepared in close collaboration with the author. Here are all eleven books of poetry in their original order of publication, spanning the entire arc of his long career from Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (1959/1965) to This Present Moment (2016), along with many uncollected poems, drafts, fragments, and translations in newly authoritative texts reflecting Snyder’s corrections and revisions.
Early works like Myths & Texts (1960), The Back Country (1968), and Regarding Wave (1970) reflect Snyder’s hardscrabble upbringing in the Pacific Northwest and his experience as a logger, fire-lookout, freighter crewman, and Buddhist initiate. They reveal an idiosyncratic and extraordinarily cosmopolitan imagination, one that found inspiration not only in the writings of Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg—contemporaries and friends with whom he is often linked—but also in East Asian literature and philosophy, indigenous North American myths and legends, and in the Western poetic tradition from Sappho and Ovid to Whitman and Pound.
Snyder’s work at mid-career, most notably his Pulitzer Prize–winning Turtle Island (1974), reveals the impact of the Vietnam War and the burgeoning environmental movement, as he takes on a public, even hortatory voice, becoming a kind of elder statesman of the counterculture and spokesman for the natural world. Axe Handles (1983), Left Out in the Rain (1986), and new poems from No Nature (1992) present his spare and lyric reflections on mindfulness, family and community life, natural and karmic cycles, and mortality. Over forty years in the making and considered by many to be his masterpiece, his long poem Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) brilliantly distills and concentrates a lifetime’s themes; the autobiographical haibun of Danger on Peaks (2004) recall his youthful ascent of Mount St. Helens, seedbed for a series of reflections on disasters from Hiroshima to 9/11.
Rounding out the volume is a selection of more than fifty rarities—from little magazines, chapbooks, broadsides, and rediscovered manuscripts—including nine poems published here for the first time.
Early works like Myths & Texts (1960), The Back Country (1968), and Regarding Wave (1970) reflect Snyder’s hardscrabble upbringing in the Pacific Northwest and his experience as a logger, fire-lookout, freighter crewman, and Buddhist initiate. They reveal an idiosyncratic and extraordinarily cosmopolitan imagination, one that found inspiration not only in the writings of Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg—contemporaries and friends with whom he is often linked—but also in East Asian literature and philosophy, indigenous North American myths and legends, and in the Western poetic tradition from Sappho and Ovid to Whitman and Pound.
Snyder’s work at mid-career, most notably his Pulitzer Prize–winning Turtle Island (1974), reveals the impact of the Vietnam War and the burgeoning environmental movement, as he takes on a public, even hortatory voice, becoming a kind of elder statesman of the counterculture and spokesman for the natural world. Axe Handles (1983), Left Out in the Rain (1986), and new poems from No Nature (1992) present his spare and lyric reflections on mindfulness, family and community life, natural and karmic cycles, and mortality. Over forty years in the making and considered by many to be his masterpiece, his long poem Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) brilliantly distills and concentrates a lifetime’s themes; the autobiographical haibun of Danger on Peaks (2004) recall his youthful ascent of Mount St. Helens, seedbed for a series of reflections on disasters from Hiroshima to 9/11.
Rounding out the volume is a selection of more than fifty rarities—from little magazines, chapbooks, broadsides, and rediscovered manuscripts—including nine poems published here for the first time.
1105 pages, Hardcover
Published June 21, 2022
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About the author
Gary Snyder
323 books644 followersGary Snyder is an American poet, essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. His early poetry has been associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance and he has been described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology". Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award. His work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. He has translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese. For many years, Snyder was an academic at the University of California, Davis, and for a time served as a member of the California Arts Council.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 21, 2022
I hope there will be more Snyder to add to this, but for now, we can consider this the definitive edition of his poems. An essential addition to American letters. I had the chance to review it; Here's the review and then the link to where it first. appeared in the New York Journal of Books:
Gary Snyder: Collected Poems
edited by Jack Shoemaker and Anthony Hunt
release date: June 21, 2022
reviewed by Keith Taylor
For the last 40 years the Library of America, a non-profit publisher, has attempted to establish and radically expand a canon of American literature. The books are meticulously edited, usually with helpful endnotes and chronologies, printed on fine paper, and beautifully bound. There is little controversy when they pick their books from among the great dead, even from those previously ignored. They enter more uncertain areas when they pick from writers who are still alive and actively working. There can be little doubt that the work of Gary Snyder belongs in this company.
Snyder has been a cultural figure central to many influential movements that have shaped American thought over the last 70 years. Because of his friendships with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, he was associated early on with the Beats, even though he never quite fit into that group. He was from a rural background rather than an urban one; he was comfortable spending long periods alone; and he was out of the country for much of the late 50s and early 60s when the Beats had their greatest influence.
During that period Snyder lived in Japan, often in a Zen monastery, where he did a deep dive into the Buddhist tradition and Asian languages. When he returned, he was one of the most informed popular explicators of Buddhism to America.
He moved to the High Sierras around 1970, built his own place there, and has stayed for these last 50 years. His writings, poems and essays, about that place, and about the importance of personal rootedness, have helped shape policy and the movement known as Deep Ecology.
All of these ways of engaging the world appear in the poems that are collected in this volume. They all inform what might be Snyder’s greatest contribution to our uncertain national canon: he is one of the main writers of the American West. The landscape on the far side of the Rockies is the landscape that provides the images to his imagination. He looks west, across the Pacific rather than east across the Atlantic, to find his necessary cultural influences.
This Collected Poems feels like an expansion of imagination rather than a formal progression. The first poem, “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout,” from Snyder’s first book, Riprap, published in 1959 establishes a way of looking at the world that echoes throughout these 1000 pages:
Down a valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
In his notes at the end of that first book, Snyder writes, “The idea of a poetry with minimal surface texture, under the bank, a dark old lurking, no fancy flavor, is ancient.” That is the working aesthetic that is clear throughout this book, all the way to the final poem from Snyder’s most recent full collection, This Present Moment,” published in 2015. That last poem, “Go Now,” is an elegy for Carole Koda, the poet’s wife. It is not a poem that is easy to read because Snyder looks at death and the dead body of his beloved with the same clarity he had when he looked out over that landscape in the North Cascades so many years earlier. The poem ends with the poet and his son looking one last time at the body, reflecting on the Buddhist notion of non-attachment:
Kai and I one more time
take a deep breath
—this is the price of attachment—
“Worth it. Easily worth it—”
Still in love, being there,
seeing and smelling and feeling it,
thinking farewell,
worth even the smell.
Between these two points, this Collected includes all of Snyder’s poems. Occasionally polemical, even willfully didactic, there are the famous books from the late 1960s and early 70s, including his Pulitzer Prize winning Turtle Island. There is the extraordinary Danger on Peaks, where the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens, a mountain Snyder climbed several times in his life, is a powerful metaphor for the notion of impermanence.
Snyder worked on his monumental poem, Mountains and Rivers Without End, for decades. In this poem he combines much of what he learned in his long time in Japan with the life he lived on the West Coast. At times it can be a difficult poem, one that demands we find the associations between very different bodies of knowledge. This volume includes the original notes Snyder used for the 1996 publication as well as new notes he helped prepare for this volume. They help explain things that previously were a bit opaque.
Volumes of collected poems are often kept on the shelf so their readers can dip into them from time to time to remember a poem or be reminded of a poet. Gary Snyder’s Collected Poems can actually be read all the way through, from beginning to end. The poems, evocative and filled with the knowledge of things we might not know, are nestled in the context of this remarkable work and personality, both so important to an understanding of American thought and the landscape that formed it.
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...
Gary Snyder: Collected Poems
edited by Jack Shoemaker and Anthony Hunt
release date: June 21, 2022
reviewed by Keith Taylor
For the last 40 years the Library of America, a non-profit publisher, has attempted to establish and radically expand a canon of American literature. The books are meticulously edited, usually with helpful endnotes and chronologies, printed on fine paper, and beautifully bound. There is little controversy when they pick their books from among the great dead, even from those previously ignored. They enter more uncertain areas when they pick from writers who are still alive and actively working. There can be little doubt that the work of Gary Snyder belongs in this company.
Snyder has been a cultural figure central to many influential movements that have shaped American thought over the last 70 years. Because of his friendships with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, he was associated early on with the Beats, even though he never quite fit into that group. He was from a rural background rather than an urban one; he was comfortable spending long periods alone; and he was out of the country for much of the late 50s and early 60s when the Beats had their greatest influence.
During that period Snyder lived in Japan, often in a Zen monastery, where he did a deep dive into the Buddhist tradition and Asian languages. When he returned, he was one of the most informed popular explicators of Buddhism to America.
He moved to the High Sierras around 1970, built his own place there, and has stayed for these last 50 years. His writings, poems and essays, about that place, and about the importance of personal rootedness, have helped shape policy and the movement known as Deep Ecology.
All of these ways of engaging the world appear in the poems that are collected in this volume. They all inform what might be Snyder’s greatest contribution to our uncertain national canon: he is one of the main writers of the American West. The landscape on the far side of the Rockies is the landscape that provides the images to his imagination. He looks west, across the Pacific rather than east across the Atlantic, to find his necessary cultural influences.
This Collected Poems feels like an expansion of imagination rather than a formal progression. The first poem, “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout,” from Snyder’s first book, Riprap, published in 1959 establishes a way of looking at the world that echoes throughout these 1000 pages:
Down a valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
In his notes at the end of that first book, Snyder writes, “The idea of a poetry with minimal surface texture, under the bank, a dark old lurking, no fancy flavor, is ancient.” That is the working aesthetic that is clear throughout this book, all the way to the final poem from Snyder’s most recent full collection, This Present Moment,” published in 2015. That last poem, “Go Now,” is an elegy for Carole Koda, the poet’s wife. It is not a poem that is easy to read because Snyder looks at death and the dead body of his beloved with the same clarity he had when he looked out over that landscape in the North Cascades so many years earlier. The poem ends with the poet and his son looking one last time at the body, reflecting on the Buddhist notion of non-attachment:
Kai and I one more time
take a deep breath
—this is the price of attachment—
“Worth it. Easily worth it—”
Still in love, being there,
seeing and smelling and feeling it,
thinking farewell,
worth even the smell.
Between these two points, this Collected includes all of Snyder’s poems. Occasionally polemical, even willfully didactic, there are the famous books from the late 1960s and early 70s, including his Pulitzer Prize winning Turtle Island. There is the extraordinary Danger on Peaks, where the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens, a mountain Snyder climbed several times in his life, is a powerful metaphor for the notion of impermanence.
Snyder worked on his monumental poem, Mountains and Rivers Without End, for decades. In this poem he combines much of what he learned in his long time in Japan with the life he lived on the West Coast. At times it can be a difficult poem, one that demands we find the associations between very different bodies of knowledge. This volume includes the original notes Snyder used for the 1996 publication as well as new notes he helped prepare for this volume. They help explain things that previously were a bit opaque.
Volumes of collected poems are often kept on the shelf so their readers can dip into them from time to time to remember a poem or be reminded of a poet. Gary Snyder’s Collected Poems can actually be read all the way through, from beginning to end. The poems, evocative and filled with the knowledge of things we might not know, are nestled in the context of this remarkable work and personality, both so important to an understanding of American thought and the landscape that formed it.
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...
October 8, 2022
This is an epic brick of a book. I went into it recalling some Gary Snyder nature poems that I'd been moved by many years ago, and otherwise not knowing what to expect. Turns out, the range was wide and the experience marked by a lot of love and hate. The misogyny is rampant, especially in the earlier decades, and there's also a sense of women as alien creatures that befuddle the poor male brain. There's graphic nudity at times semi-erotic and at times brutally clinical. Most disturbing were poems about his children's private parts, which nearly made me figuratively throw the book across the room, but I realized he seemed to be trying to contextualize the human animal in light of other mammalian biology. But part of me still feels queasy at the thought of him exploiting his kids' bodies for art when they were unable to consent. Of course, it's 2022 now. #Metoo happened, and the world has changed quite a bit. OTOH, I'm possibly reacting to tone: when mothers write poems about bathing their young children, there's often a loving, amazed narrative voice. It could be the clinical analysis of the biological specimen that bugs me.
It isn't fair to single out a handful of works that disturbed me, though. The nature poems are by and large lovely. The poems delving into anthropology are interesting, especially from the pov of a man, born in 1930, who grew up very poor in the pacific northwest and has spent his life living off the land by avocation, rather than necessity.
He made me want to go camping. And look under rocks to see what critters are there. And to go outside at night and stare at the moon (if not the stars, as so few are visible anymore). Snyder's poems themselves are fairly straightforward; he doesn't go in for soft feelings or metaphor. But as a body of work the variety is complex, as if he's taken a million snapshots of moments in his life and stitched them all together. It's partly a self-portrait and largely a portrait of the West, as it was, without ubiquitous strip-malls and fast food joints. Before capitalism took so many forests and grasslands and wetlands away.
It isn't fair to single out a handful of works that disturbed me, though. The nature poems are by and large lovely. The poems delving into anthropology are interesting, especially from the pov of a man, born in 1930, who grew up very poor in the pacific northwest and has spent his life living off the land by avocation, rather than necessity.
He made me want to go camping. And look under rocks to see what critters are there. And to go outside at night and stare at the moon (if not the stars, as so few are visible anymore). Snyder's poems themselves are fairly straightforward; he doesn't go in for soft feelings or metaphor. But as a body of work the variety is complex, as if he's taken a million snapshots of moments in his life and stitched them all together. It's partly a self-portrait and largely a portrait of the West, as it was, without ubiquitous strip-malls and fast food joints. Before capitalism took so many forests and grasslands and wetlands away.
Read
September 25, 2022This.is a marvelous edition. At a thousand pages, it gives me encyclopedic access to Mr. Snyder's massive and gifted life work.
June 21, 2022
My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Library of America for an advanced copy of this collection by an American man of letters.
A life well lived is one that a person is able to do what they love, what they are best at, which allows them to be happy, to make others happy, and makes a difference in the world. That is just my theory, but it seems something to strive for, though society seems to frown on it. Gary Snyder has been living his best life for over 90 years, seventy of those years writing poetry, essays, or just putting words on paper for any reason he wants to. The Library of America has collected almost all of Mr. Snyder's works in one volume, Gary Snyder Collected Poems (Library of America #351), edited by Anthony Hunt and Jack Shoemaker.
Starting with poems written in the forests that he worked either logging of as fire spotted in the national parks, Mr. Snyder began writing about the trees, the land, the men who traveled it and the feelings it gave him. The influence of the Beats, was predominant in his early works, until his return to school and his fascination with Asian art and poetry began. Soon he was translating many Zen poets, offering those to western readers for the first time, along with more poems about his travels in Japan, and on the Pacific where he worked as a sailor on many a tramp freighter. Included are works like Turtle Island, which won a Pulitzer, Axe Handles which won the National Book Award, and his epic poem in both length and time it took to writer Mountains and Rivers Without End which was created and formed over four decades.
The poems tell of men, women nature, love, life, and his children growing. Essays are included,pieces about his family, his life, and his love of nature and conservancy. Some poems are short, some are long, but the imagery is usually powerful. As with anything some of the works have not dated well, attitudes change, maturity sets in, but most seem fresh and as new as when they were written. The notes section is very informative, and comprehensive with an full publishing history for many of the poems, that is fascinating to read. Some of the works have never before been published, so that is also a treat.
Recommended for poetry fans, fans of the beats, of nature, Zen, and good poems. Library of America always makes beautiful collections and this one is no exception. A great addition to any reader's collection.
A life well lived is one that a person is able to do what they love, what they are best at, which allows them to be happy, to make others happy, and makes a difference in the world. That is just my theory, but it seems something to strive for, though society seems to frown on it. Gary Snyder has been living his best life for over 90 years, seventy of those years writing poetry, essays, or just putting words on paper for any reason he wants to. The Library of America has collected almost all of Mr. Snyder's works in one volume, Gary Snyder Collected Poems (Library of America #351), edited by Anthony Hunt and Jack Shoemaker.
Starting with poems written in the forests that he worked either logging of as fire spotted in the national parks, Mr. Snyder began writing about the trees, the land, the men who traveled it and the feelings it gave him. The influence of the Beats, was predominant in his early works, until his return to school and his fascination with Asian art and poetry began. Soon he was translating many Zen poets, offering those to western readers for the first time, along with more poems about his travels in Japan, and on the Pacific where he worked as a sailor on many a tramp freighter. Included are works like Turtle Island, which won a Pulitzer, Axe Handles which won the National Book Award, and his epic poem in both length and time it took to writer Mountains and Rivers Without End which was created and formed over four decades.
The poems tell of men, women nature, love, life, and his children growing. Essays are included,pieces about his family, his life, and his love of nature and conservancy. Some poems are short, some are long, but the imagery is usually powerful. As with anything some of the works have not dated well, attitudes change, maturity sets in, but most seem fresh and as new as when they were written. The notes section is very informative, and comprehensive with an full publishing history for many of the poems, that is fascinating to read. Some of the works have never before been published, so that is also a treat.
Recommended for poetry fans, fans of the beats, of nature, Zen, and good poems. Library of America always makes beautiful collections and this one is no exception. A great addition to any reader's collection.
November 11, 2022
Like any solid Library of America collection, there’s something every reader can appreciate here: the vast reservoir of footnotes, the firm and thorough chronology, not to mention the poems themselves.
It’s an astounding collection of more than fifty years of writings from Gary Snyder whose interests in Chinese poetry, Buddhism, and Ecology lend a resonance that echoes with each subsequent work.
My favorite? “Old Woodrat’s Stinky House”. Beyond the title, its profound imagery humbles.
It’s an astounding collection of more than fifty years of writings from Gary Snyder whose interests in Chinese poetry, Buddhism, and Ecology lend a resonance that echoes with each subsequent work.
My favorite? “Old Woodrat’s Stinky House”. Beyond the title, its profound imagery humbles.
Read
August 8, 2022Replacing my Snyder poetry books with this single tome would certainly provide shelf space. Someday perhaps. Interesting additions at the end (before some Chinese translations).
December 13, 2023
"I’m most struck by how, for Snyder, poetry isn’t just equipment for living. It is living. His loose-limbed life—relentlessly social even while it attends to, and imagines its way into, the non-human—ambles through his loose-limbed poetry." -Anthony Domestico
Read the full review here: https://books.substack.com/p/review-a...
Read the full review here: https://books.substack.com/p/review-a...
April 22, 2023
A beautiful book for fans of Gary Snyder.
October 20, 2024
At approximately 1,000 pages, this massive work is now the definitive collection of Gary Snyder’s writings.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews