Left Out in the Rain: New Poems 1947-1985

by Gary Snyder

Poems from five decades deal with nature, aging, birth, magic, history, myth, travel, the atom bomb, love, marriage, and politics

Genres: Poetry

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Gary 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.

Reviews

[Mat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another brilliant and lengthy volume of some of Snyder's lesser known poems.

This book is divided into 8 sections chronologically, and assembled according to when Snyder wrote the poems. There are some absolute gems in this collection ("Fording the Flooded Goldie River", "April", "Makings", "One Year", "W" (one of the cutest poems I have ever read), "Gatha for All Threatened Beings", "The Taste" (a brilliant poem), "The Elusiad" (mind-blowingly good), "Versions of Anacreon" and "Tree Song" among many other greats).
However there is also the occasional clanger such as "Fear not" which many other reviewers have already (rightfully) pointed out is not Snyder at his best. However, fortunately, such poems are not a rule of thumb but an exception.

The poems in the final section, "Satires, Inventions & Diversions 1951-1980" are the most challenging as they are obscure, subtle or esoteric and appear to be simple on the surface but are rather perplexing.

All in all, this is a fantastic book and very nearly deserves 5 stars. This is my fourth favourite book of Snyder's after....

1) Mountains and Rivers Without End (a masterpiece)
2) The Real Work (brilliant interviews with Snyder in which you can see how intelligent and educated this man is)
3) Turtle Island (his second poetry masterpiece).

I know, like with the books listed above, I will be returning to this volume again and again in future. I feel lucky to own a copy signed by Gary Snyder himself!

[Nadine in NY Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection is sort of The Greatest Hits from the B-sides, edited by Snyder, himself.

Snyder excels at perfectly describing the natural world, in just a few lines, suddenly you feel like you are there.

Longitude 170° West, Latitude 35° North

For Ruth Sasaki

This realm half sky half water,
night black with white foam
streaks of glowing fish
the high half black too lit with
dots of stars,
The thrum of the diesel engine twirling
sixty-foot drive shafts of twin screws,
Shape of a boat, and floating
over a mile of living seawater, underway,
always westward, dropping
land behind us to the east,
Brought only these brown Booby birds that trail
a taste of landfall feathers in the craw
hatchrock barrens—old migrations—
flicking from off the stern into thoughts,
Sailing jellyfish by day, phosphorescent
light at night,
shift of current on the ocean floor
food chains climbing to the whale.

Ship hanging on this membrane infinitely
tiny in the “heights” the “deep”
air-bound beings in the realm of wind
or water, holding hand to wing or fin
Swimming westward to the farther shore,
this is what I wanted? so much
water in the world and so much crossing,
oceans of truth and seas of doctrine
Salty real seas of our westering world,
Dharma-spray of lonely slick on deck
Sleepy, between two lands, always a-
floating world,
I go below.

M.S. Arita Maru, 1956

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like this collection is less about gathering the best of Snyder's work from these years and more a way to show his progression and development as a poet all in one place. He's playing and experimenting and just capturing life, not necessarily aiming at something with as much unity as his Mountains and Rivers. Which in itself is somewhat the theme of the collection. As he says:

"What history fails to mention is
Most everybody lived their lives
With friends and children, played it cool,
Left truth & beauty to the guys
Who tricked for bigshots, and were fools."

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

“What history fails to mention is”

What history fails to mention is

Most everybody lived their lives
With friends and children, played it cool,
Left truth & beauty to the guys
Who tricked for bigshots, and were fools


I've not read anything of Snyder's I've not enjoyed, so I knew I was going to love this, especially as, being autobiographical, it was a chance to get to know more about him and his life. It’s full of gems, but the poem above really shone, because it manages to be both direct and contradictory at the same time. It’s the last comma. If it wasn’t there, it would be completely clear that the bigshot-tracking guys were the fools. With it, it’s ambiguous.

So are people foolish to abandon truth and beauty? Or are those chasing it the idiots? Gig-goers who watch the stage through the screen of a camera. Surely he watched enough members of the Beat Generation ripping themselves pursuing literary ideals to feel a bit sick about them - I'm inclined to think he thought you should just roll with it, and the truth and beauty would look after themselves. Just Being seems to be a big theme in Snyder’s work - the spirituality comes as a result of doing, rather than the other way round. The entire collection could be summed up by "What history fails to mention is." A mix of very solid, grounded physicality and downright philosophy. As is life. He’s fantastic, is Gary Snyder.

[marie monroe · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you want to know what it was like to follow the straight line of hippie-dom, this might help. It alludes to the fallen transcendents, but synder persevered where many swerved.

[Crotillus]

I know what Dante meant now,
when entering that forest
and then the cave, faced by wolves

[Haylee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't say enough good things about Gary Snyder's poetry. The man makes me happy.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Primarily for readers (like me) who want to read everything Snyder has written. Left Out in the Rain is essentially a collection of "leftovers," poems written over the first 35 years or so of his career that didn't find a home in his first five collections. Some are basically occasional poems, others formal experiments. All interesting and a handful that compare well with the work that established his reputation.

The poems I flagged include: "The Rainy Season," "Late October Camping in the Sawtooths," "Hills of Home," "Crash," "At Tower Peak," and "Ripples on the Surface." "Ballad of Rolling Heads" and "Building" provide fascinating glimpses of biographical moments, the first including snapshots of Allen Ginsberg, Phil Whalen, Neil Cassady and others.

A favorite snippet, from "Tower Peak":

A day or two or a million, breathing
A few steps back from what goes down
In the current realm.
A kind of ice age, spreading, filling valleys
Shaving soils, paving fields, you can walk it
Live in it, drive through it then
It melts away
For whatever sprouts
After the age of
Frozen hearts.

[Ignacio Muñoz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tenía muchas ganas de leer los poemas del "Japhy Ryder" que aparece en Los Vagabundos del Dharma de Kerouac. Creo que no elegí el mejor libro para comenzar. En el prefacio, el autor rápidamente advierte que los poemas antologados no corresponden a “descartes”, pero también apunta la ausencia de “una coherencia interna” que sí poseen otros libros suyos. Y es que en realidad se trata de una extensa selección que abarca desde sus escritos adolescentes hasta creaciones satíricas más tardías de 1980, pasando por textos amorosos, breves descripciones sobre su estadía en Japón, poemas sobre la vida de las ciudades modernas, reflexiones que mezclan el budismo con la filosofía de los pueblos nativos de Norteamérica, relatos de viajes y caminatas por bosques y montañas, meditaciones sobre el lento sufrimiento de las rocas, epigramas y aforismos sobre pájaros y grillos, entre muchas otras cosas. Supongo que esta diversidad se hace más interesante después de que uno ya leyó sus primeras obras y puede sentarse a observar el panorama. No fue mi caso: sentí que estaba saltando de una faceta a otra sin lograr profundizar demasiado. Aunque igual me encontré con muchos poemas hermosos que volveré a releer. Y me quedé con la tarea de ir buscar esos libros suyos con coherencia interna para empezar desde el principio.

[Michael P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some poems are a great, several bores, and to most I am indifferent.

[Vivian Zenari · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this one more than the more recent book. I liked the simple poems but also the ones that seem to come from the so call Beat years. I liked the nature poems as well

[Margaret · Rating 3 out of 5]

Always good.

[Genevieve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this in full (then most of it again) while backpacking in Desolation Wilderness! Almost too on the nose. I love the very simple ones best, especially The North Coast, and one about persimmons.

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's always interesting to see what Snyder is doing, and so I picked this collection up at the library. None of his classics are compiled here, and yet, I found it to be a fairly enjoyable read. These poems are sometimes difficult to decipher but are intoned honestly enough, and reflect the shortcomings (and long-goings) of the whole beatnik countercultural scene. Thankfully, Snyder was on the frayed edges of that scene, and, as a result, can often rise above the ridiculously antiquated 50's colloquialisms that other authors of his era brandish so brazenly.

There is however a good bit of unreadable poetry, too. It is playful and even the bad poems display exceptional use of enjambment, but I am (understandably?) skeptical as to the value of lines such as: "Two women masturbate a corpse" or "The Fox-girls switch from/ human to fox-form/ right during the party!/ one man/ who was doing cunnilingus on his friend,/ now finds a mouth/ of fur" ("Fear Not," 142). I think this sometimes-shittiness is most prominent in the longer poems—especially "Vulture Peak," which is strange and probably was written while stoned. Or it seems that way due to its 'zany' scatter-brained jabbering, i.e. "A badger gave me visions/ A whale made me pure." What? On a surface level, its inconsistent use of punctuation makes it look sloppy, and its grammatical errors make it sound sloppy. Ultimately though, this poem reads like an excerpt of Kerouac's Some of the Dharma: a slipshod, slapdash, frenzied plenty of nonsense!

What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that these poems are not awful; they are travel poems and experimentals, mood poems and pseudo-haikus. They span such a long stretch of time that they lack a real consistency with each other, and while it's true, they are set to a backdrop of Eastern thought, they often are caught in the lonely ruggedness of the Western United States. I would consider reading this again a year from now.

Recommended: "Numerous Broken Eggs" (36), "Geological Meditation" (43), "For Alan Watts" (123), "For Berkeley" (158), "The Forest Fire at Ananda" (165)

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a mishmash of uncollected poems from 1947 to 1985: some are gems, others less so. Snyder's early beatnik traveling hippie stuff is very accessible, all the stuff about the hiking and the ocean, the mountains and Japan. Sometimes it's a little hippie-beatnik dated, too.

There were a couple of lovely things here though, and in many cases they were poems of more formal craft than I usually associate with Snyder. My favorite was a poem from the 1950s called "The Lookouts," reflecting Snyder's time as a fire lookout in the Northwest.

This book is not the place to start if you are new to Snyder. (The place for newbies to start is a collected poems volume called No Nature.)

I will also note that although my book has this cover image, it is published by North Point Press in San Francisco, not FSG.

[Ron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry recently released a collection of letters. I thought I'd look for something by Gary Snyder before reading the letters. I'm not sure that this is his best work, and I'll look for something else that has a higher rating.

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

yeah ... not so much [for me:].

[Mills College Library]

811.54 S675L 1986