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Gary Snyder: Collected Poems

Edited by Jack Shoemaker and Anthony Hunt

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News & Views

Overview

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Interviews Anthony Hunt on the collected Gary Snyder: “His poems move us, drive us back to our fundamental roots”
September 6, 2022

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.

See a PDF of the table of contents.

Jack Shoemaker, editor, is Founding Editor of Counterpoint Press, publishing the works of Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, M.F.K. Fisher, Evan S. Connell, Robert Aitken, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and James Salter, among many others. He has worked with Snyder for over fifty years.

Anthony Hunt, editor, is the author of Genesis, Structure, and Meaning in Gary Snyder’s “Mountains and Rivers Without End” (2004). Now retired as professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico–Mayagüez, and a former Fulbright scholar and Peace Corps worker, he lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by Margaret & William Hearst, Bruce R. Bailey (Tokyo), and The Poetry Foundation.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

News “Your Friend, Wendell”: A 90th Birthday Tribute to Wendell Berry
August 5, 2024

News Forthcoming: Spring 2025
June 17, 2024

Interviews Anthony Hunt on the collected Gary Snyder: “His poems move us, drive us back to our fundamental roots”
September 6, 2022

Video A Tribute to Gary Snyder
July 21, 2022

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-721-5 1105 pages

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N° 357 Library of America Series

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