“A reaffirmation of a back country of the spirit."—Kirkus ReviewsThis collection is made up of four sections: "Far West"—poems of the Western mountain country where, as a young man. Gary Snyder worked as a logger and forest ranger; "Far East"—poems written between 1956 and 1964 in Japan where he studied Zen at the monastery in Kyoto; "Kali"—poems inspired by a visit to India and his reading of Indian religious texts, particularly those of Shivaism and Tibe...

An indispensable map of a classic Zen text.“Mountains and waters are the expression of old buddhas.”So begins “Sansuikyo,” or “Mountains and Waters Sutra,” a masterpiece of poetry and insight from Eihei Dogen, the thirteenth-century founder of the Soto school of Zen.Shohaku Okumura—renowned for his translations of and magisterial teachings on Dogen—guides the reader through the rich layers of metaphor and meaning in “Sansuikyo,” which is often thoug...

A collection of captivatingly meditative essays that display a deep understanding of Buddhist belief, wildness, wildlife, and the world from an American cultural force.With thoughts ranging from political and spiritual matters to those regarding the environment and the art of becoming native to this continent, the nine essays in The Practice of the Wild display the deep understanding and wide erudition of Gary Snyder. These essays, first published in 1990,...

**Finalist in CALIBA's 2022 Golden Poppy Book AwardsA collection of previously uncollected and unpublished works by a Pulitzer Prize-winning Beat poet Gary Snyder, written during his most productive and important years**Far from being a simple miscellany of poems, Uncollected Poems, Drafts, Fragments, and Translations contains some of Gary Snyder’s best work, written during his most productive and important years.Many of these have been published in magazin...

By any measure, Gary Snyder is one of the greatest poets in America in the last century. From his first book of poems to his latest collection of essays, his work and his example, standing between Tu Fu and Thoreau, have been influential all over the world. Riprap, his first book of poems, was published in Japan in 1959 by Origin Press, and it is the fiftieth anniversary of that groundbreaking book we celebrate with this edition. A small press reprint of that book included Snyder'...

"The letters are valuable for ecologists, students, and teachers of contemporary American literature and for those of us eager to know how these two distant neighbors networked, negotiated, and remained friends." —San Francisco ChronicleIn 1969, Gary Snyder returned from a long residence in Japan to northern California, to a homestead in the Sierra foothills where he intended to build a house and settle on the land with his wife and young sons. He had just...

For the full course of his remarkable career, Gary Snyder has continued his study of Eastern culture and philosophies. From the Ainu to the Mongols, from Hokkaido to Kyoto, from the landscapes of China to the backcountry of contemporary Japan, from the temples of Daitokoji to the Yellow River Valley, it is now clear how this work has influenced his poetry, his stance as an environmental and political activist, and his long practice of Zen. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Asia became a...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1975)These Pulitzer Prize-winning poems and essays by the author of No Nature range from the lucid, lyrical, and mystical to the political. All, however, share a common vision: a rediscovery of North America and the ways by which we might become true natives of the land for the first time.

One of the central relationships in the Beat scene was the long–lasting friendship of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder. Ginsberg introduced Snyder to the East Coast Beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, while Snyder himself became the model for the serious poet that Ginsberg so wanted to become. Snyder encouraged Ginsberg to explore the beauty of the West Coast and, even more lastingly, introduced Ginsberg to Buddhism, the subject of so many long letter exchanges between them. Beginning in 1...

In this thoughtful, affectionate collection of interviews and letters spanning three decades, beloved poet Gary Snyder talks with South African writer and scholar Julia Martin. Over this period many things changed decisively-globally, locally, and in their personal lives-and these changing conditions provide the back story for a long conversation. It begins in the early 1980s as an intellectual exchange between an earnest graduate student and a generous distinguished writer, and becomes a ...

The title, Regarding Wave, reflects "a half-buried series of word origins dating back through the Indo-European language: intersections of energy, woman, song and 'Gone Beyond Wisdom.'""Wild nature as the ultimate ground of human affairs"––the beautiful, precarious balance among forces and species forms a unifying theme for the new poems in this collection. The title, Regarding Wave, reflects "a half-buried series of word origins dating back through the Indo-Europe...

Both Pound and Williams have shown a good poet can revitalize prose style. Earth House Hold (a play on the root meaning of "ecology"), drawn from Gary Snyder's essays and journals, may prove a landmark for the new generation."As a poet," Snyder tells us, "I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic; the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying intuition and rebirth; the love...