Books by Gary Snyder

No Nature: New and Selected Poems

by Gary Snyder

"The greatest of living nature poets. . . . It helps us to go on, having Gary Snyder in our midst."--Los Angeles Times. Snyder is the author of many volumes of poetry and prose, including The Practice of the Wild and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Turtle Island. Reading tour.

Look Out: A Selection of Writings (New Directions Bibelot)

by Gary Snyder

Personal favorites selected by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet himself. Beginning with the publication of The Back Country in 1968, Gary Snyder's long-cherished association with New Directions continued through the publication of his poetry books: the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling Turtle Island (1974), and Myths & Texts (1978), as well as his prose works, Earth House Hold (1969) and The Real Work (1980), all essential titles on the New Directions list. Snyder's No Nature: New and Selected Poems, a finalist for the National Book Award, was published in 1993 by Pantheon, and his long-anticipated epic poem Mountains and Rivers without End was published by Counterpoint in 1997. Snyder has had a seminal place among American landscape writers. "As a poet," he once wrote, "I hold the most archaic values on earth." He has long been associated with Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and other poets such as Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan. His poetics are founded in Poundian modernism, Chinese and Japanese poetry, and ancient oral native traditions.

Look Out is a collection personally compiled by Gary Snyder for New Directions, containing poems and essays from all his New Directions books. It offers first-time readers a chance to see the evolution of his thought and poetry, spanning two decades, and old-time fans the opportunity to behold all the favorites, in a new Bibelot edition. Also included here is Snyder's Introduction, as well as a new poem written about the late New Directions founder James Laughlin.

Danger on Peaks: Poems

by Gary Snyder

As a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, bioregional activist, Zen Buddhist, and reluctant counterculture guru, Gary Snyder has been a major artistic force in America for over five decades, extending far beyond the Beat poems that first brought his work into the public eye.

Danger on Peaks begins with poems about Snyder’s first ascent of Mount St. Helens in 1945 and his learning that atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the morning of his descent. Containing work in a surprising variety of styles, creating an arc-shaped trail from these earliest climbs to what the poet calls poems “of intimate, immediate life, gossip and insight,” Danger on Peaks is Snyder’s most personal work ever.

Left Out in the Rain: Poems

by Gary Snyder

“The reading is something like archeology, sifting the layers that have built up over the years to find the source of a familiar voice . . . Left Out in the Rain shows us the footsteps in the wet meadow grass.” ―Los Angeles Times

“A fascinating case study and verse autobiography of a man who long ago staked his claim as one of America’s finest poets.” ―Boston Herald

When Gary Snyder was in his twenties working as a forester and logger, one of the old loggers told him, “If you’re gonna work these woods, don’t want nothing that can’t be left out in the rain.”

Borrowing the phrase, Left Out in the Rain charts the journeys of the poet from 1947 to 1985. From the mountains and shores of the Pacific Northwest to the city streets of San Francisco, New York, and Kyoto, Snyder’s reflections are as much about the human experience as they are about the environment that encompasses it.

Sensual, sardonic, meditative, epigrammatic, formalist―whatever the subject, tone, or structure, these poems all bear the indelible stamp of a master. A villanelle for Finnish folklore, riffs on the neo-formalist poems trendy in the 1950s, a sestina on the philosophical dilemmas of anthropology and linguistics, a transformation of the third century BC Daoist essay “Discourse on Swords” into a satire on contemporary warlike administrations and governments―the experiments in this collection place Snyder among the most diverse of contemporary poets.

Left Out in the Rain means to include items carefully chosen to outlast the elements and remain useful for years. In his new preface to this edition, Snyder notes, “This complicated gathering of many poems, tight and loose together is like an understory ecosystem of the Old Growth. It needs rain.”

On the wooded coast,
eating oysters
Looking off toward
China and Japan
“If you’re gonna
work these woods
Don’t want nothing
That can’t be
left out in the rain―”

Axe Handles: Poems

by Gary Snyder

In Axe Handles Mr. Snyder reveals the roots of community in the family and explores the transmission of cultural values and knowledge.
"In making the handle of an axe by cutting wood with an axe the model is indeed near at hand." In exploring this axiom of Lu Ji’s, Gary Snyder continues:

I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on.

This is a collection of discovery, of insight, and of vision. These poems see the roots of community in the family, and the roots of culture and government in the community.
Formally, the 71 poems in Axe Handles range from lyrics to riddles to narratives. The collection is divided into three parts, called "Loops," "Little Songs for Gaia," and "Nets," each containing poems of disciplined clarity. Gary Snyder knows well the great power of silence in a poem, silence that allows the mind space enough to discover the magic of song.

Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems

by Gary Snyder

Forty-five years ago, Gary Snyder’s first book of poems, Riprap, was published by Origin Press in a beautiful paperbound edition stitched Japanese-style. Around that time Snyder published his translations of Chinese poet Han-Shan’s Cold Mountain Poems in the sixth issue of the “Evergreen Review.” Thus was launched one of the most remarkable literary careers of the last century. It is a great gift for all readers to now have this seminal collection back in print.

Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems

by Gary Snyder

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, has 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 50th anniversary of that groundbreaking book that is celebrated with this new edition. A small press reprint of that book included Snyder’s translations of Han Shan’s Cold Mountain Poems, perhaps the finest translations of that remarkable poet ever made into English.

For the 50th anniversary, this completely redesigned edition of Riprap is accompanied by a CD of Snyder reading all the poems in this collection, with introductions and asides. The recording, made in the poet’s home by Jack Loeffler, marks the first time a complete reading has ever been available in a commercial edition.

One of the finest collections of poems published in the 20th century, this edition will please those already familiar with this work and excite a new generation of readers with its profound simplicity and spare elegance.

Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems

by Gary Snyder

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’s translations of Han Shan’s Cold Mountain Poems, perhaps the finest translations of that remarkable poet ever made into English.

Reintroducing one of the twentieth century's foremost collections of poetry, this edition will please those already familiar with this work and excite a new generation of readers with its profound simplicity and spare elegance.

Danger on Peaks

by Gary Snyder

In his first collection of new poems since Axe Handles (1983), Gary Snyder includes fifty-five new poems and prose poems. As longtime readers will recognize, this collection is unique in Snyder’s oeuvre, finding the poet experimenting with a wide variety of styles, including an extended foray in the Japanese form haibun, "making it an American form," as the poet remarks. Two sections of poems exploring "intimate immediate life, gossip and insight" are some of the poet’s most personal work.

Danger on Peaks begins with the poet’s first climb of Mount St. Helens on August 13, 1945, and his learning on the morning after his descent about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Again the poet visits Mount St. Helens in 2000 to view the blast site of the 1980 eruption. Then follow poems for the Buddhas of Bamiyan Valley and the World Trade Towers. More than a mere gathering of unrelated poems, Danger on Peaks is a constructed work, where every part contributes to the whole.

The Practice of the Wild: Essays

by Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder has been a major cultural force in America for five decades. Future readers will come to see this book as one of the central texts on wilderness and the interaction of nature and culture. The nine essays in The Practice of the Wild reveal why Snyder has gone on to become one of America’s cultural leaders, comprehending things about our world before they were ever discussed in public. With thoughts ranging from political and spiritual matters to those regarding the environment and the art of becoming native to this continent, this collection of essays, first published in 1990, reflect the mature centerpiece of the author’s work and thought.

The Practice of the Wild: Essays

by Gary Snyder

"This is an important book for anyone interested in the ethical interrelationships of things, places, and people, and it is a book that is not just read but taken in." ―Library Journal
Featuring a new introduction by Robert Hass, the nine captivatingly meditative essays in The Practice of the Wild display the deep understanding and wide erudition of Gary Snyder in the ways of Buddhist belief, wildness, wildlife, and the world. These essays, first published in 1990, stand as the mature centerpiece of Snyder’s work and thought, and this profound collection is widely accepted as one of the central texts on wilderness and the interaction of nature and culture.

The High Sierra of California

by Gary Snyder

The High Sierra of California is a brilliant tribute to the bold, jagged peaks that have inspired generations of naturalists, artists, and writers. Using traditional Japanese and European woodcut techniques, Killion has created stunning visual images of the Sierra that focus on the backcountry above nine thousand feet, accessible only on foot. Accompanying these riveting images are the journals of Gary Snyder, chronicling more than forty years of travels through the High Sierra backcountry.

The High Sierra of California

by Gary Snyder

"One of the great beauties in Sierra literature, maybe the finest of all in terms of quality of image and text, both individually and in combination." —Kim Stanley Robinson
The High Sierra of California is a brilliant tribute to the bold, jagged peaks that have inspired generations of naturalists, artists, and writers. Using traditional Japanese and European woodcut techniques, Killion has created stunning visual images of the Sierra that focus on the backcountry above nine thousand feet, accessible only on foot. Accompanying these riveting images are the journals of Gary Snyder, chronicling more than forty years of travels through the High Sierra backcountry.

Myths and Texts

by Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder's second collection, Myths & Texts, was originally published in 1960 by Totem Press. It is now reissued by New Directions in this completely revised format, with an introduction by the author. The three sequences in the book―"Logging," "Hunting," "Burning"―show the remarkable cohesiveness in Snyder's writings over the years, for we find the poet absorbed, then as now, with Buddhist and Amerindian lore and other interconnections East and West, but above all with the premedical devotion to the land and work.

Mountains and Rivers Without End: Poem

by Gary Snyder

In simple, striking verse, legendary poet Gary Snyder weaves an epic discourse on the topics of geology, prehistory, and mythology. First published in 1996, this landmark work encompasses Asian artistic traditions, as well as Native American storytelling and Zen Buddhist philosophy, and celebrates the disparate elements of the Earth — sky, rock, water — while exploring the human connection to nature with stunning wisdom. Winner of the Bollingen Poetry Prize, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Orion Society's John Hay Award, among others, Gary Snyder finds his quiet brilliance celebrated in this new edition of one of his most treasured works.

A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds

by Gary Snyder

In this classic collection of 29 pieces that span half a century, Gary Snyder explores humans’ complex, ever-evolving attitudes toward the environment. He argues that nature is not separate from humanity, but intrinsic to it, and that since societies are natural constructs, it’s imperative to go beyond racial, ethnic, and religious identities to find a shared concern for acts that benefit humans and nonhumans alike. Included in the collection is his 1971 environmental manifesto “Four Changes,” which, as he writes in a postscript, is unfortunately truer than ever. In this new edition, Snyder sends out a call-to-action that challenges all beings to take moral responsibility, a call that resounds with readers discovering the book for the first time or those returning to an old favorite.

A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds

by Gary Snyder

This paperback edition of A Place in Space features 29 essays written over the past 40 years, with 13 essays written since 1990. Displaying Gary Snyder's playful and subtle intellect, these pieces explore our place on Earth and help set the tone for attitudes toward the environment.

The Etiquette of Freedom: Gary Snyder, Jim Harrison, and The Practice of the Wild

by Jim Harrison, Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder joined his old friend, novelist Jim Harrison, to discuss their loves and lives and what has become of them throughout the years. Set amidst the natural beauty of the Santa Lucia Mountains, their conversations—harnessing their ideas of all that is wild, sacred and intimate in this world—move from the admission that Snyder’s mother was a devout atheist to his personal accounts of his initiation into Zen Buddhist culture, being literally dangled by the ankles over a cliff. After years of living in Japan, Snyder returns to the States to build a farmhouse in the remote foothills of the Sierras, a homestead he calls Kitkitdizze.

For all of the depth in these conversations, Jim Harrison and Gary Snyder are humorous and friendly, and with the artfully interspersed dialogue from old friends and loves like Scott Slovic, Michael McClure, Jack Shoemaker, and Joanne Kyger, the discussion reaches a level of not only the personal, but the global, redefining our idea of the Beat Generation and challenging the future directions of the environmental movement and its association with “Deep Ecology.”

The Etiquette of Freedom is an all-encompassing companion to the film The Practice of the Wild. A DVD is included which contains the film together with more than an hour of out-takes and expanded interviews, as well as an extended reading by Gary Snyder. The whole offers a rare glimpse of their extended discussion of life and what it means to be wild and alive.

The Etiquette of Freedom: Gary Snyder, Jim Harrison, and The Practice of the Wild

by Jim Harrison, Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder joined his old friend, novelist Jim Harrison, to discuss their loves and lives and what has become of them throughout the years. Set amidst the natural beauty of the Santa Lucia Mountains, their conversations—harnessing their ideas of all that is wild, sacred and intimate in this world—move from the admission that Snyder’s mother was a devout atheist to his personal accounts of his initiation into Zen Buddhist culture, being literally dangled by the ankles over a cliff. After years of living in Japan, Snyder returns to the States to build a farmhouse in the remote foothills of the Sierras, a homestead he calls Kitkitdizze.

For all of the depth in these conversations, Jim Harrison and Gary Snyder are humorous and friendly, and with the artfully interspersed dialogue from old friends and loves like Scott Slovic, Michael McClure, Jack Shoemaker, and Joanne Kyger, the discussion reaches a level of not only the personal, but the global, redefining our idea of the Beat Generation and challenging the future directions of the environmental movement and its association with “Deep Ecology.”

The Etiquette of Freedom is an all-encompassing companion to the film The Practice of the Wild.

The Practice of the Wild: With a New Preface by the Author

by Gary Snyder

The nine captivatingly meditative essays in The Practice of the Wild display the deep understanding and wide erudition of Gary Snyder in the ways of Buddhist belief, wildness, wildlife, and the world. These essays, first published in 1990, stand as the mature centerpiece of Snyder’s work and thought, and this profound collection is widely accepted as one of the central texts on wilderness and the interaction of nature and culture.

Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places

by Gary Snyder, Julia Martin

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 long-distance friendship and an exploration of spiritual practice.

At the project’s heart is Snyder’s understanding of Buddhism. Again and again, the conversations return to an explication of the teachings. Snyder’s characteristic approach is to articulate a direct experience of Buddhist practice rather than any kind of abstract philosophy. In the version he describes here, this practice finds expression not primarily as an Asian import or a monastic ideal, but in the specificities of a householder’s life as lived creatively in a particular location at a particular moment in history. This means that whatever “topic” a dialogue explores, there is a sense that all of it is about practice—the spiritual-social practice of a contemporary poet.

Gary Snyder: Collected Poems (LOA #357) (Library of America, 357)

by Gary Snyder

The first collected edition of an essential, Pulitzer Prize-winning Beat poet, the indispensable voice whose deep ecological vision and Buddhist spirituality grows more relevant with each passing decade

Gary Snyder is one of America’s indispensable poets, the “Thoreau of the Beat Generation” and our “laureate of Deep Ecology.” Now, for the first time, all of Snyder’s poetry is gathered in a single, authoritative Library of America volume.

Here are all of Snyder’s published books of poetry spanning a career of almost seventy years. Early collections such as Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, Myths & Texts, and The Back Country reflect his hardscrabble rural upbringing in the Pacific Northwest; his life as a logger, fire-lookout, freighter crewman, carpenter, and trail-blazer; his lifelong interest in Native American oral literatures; and his pioneering studies of Zen Buddhism.

In Turtle Island and Axe Handles––the former a winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and the latter the American Book Award in 1984––he explores countercultural alternatives to environmental and spiritual decline and envisioning new forms of harmony with nature.

His epic Mountains and Rivers Without End, a poem four decades in the making and regarded by many as his masterwork, is followed by Danger on Peaks, and the intimate, preternaturally candid late lyrics of This Present Moment,which meditate on his life as a father, husband, friend, neighbor, and homesteader in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada, where he has lived since 1971.

The volume concludes with a generous selection, made by Snyder himself, of previously uncollected poems from little magazines and broadsides; translations from East Asian literatures; and drafts and fragments never before published. Also included are explanatory notes, a detailed chronology of Snyder’s life, and an essay on textual selection.

Gary Snyder: Essential Prose (LOA #391)

by Gary Snyder

In one volume, the indispensable prose of our “poet laureate of deep ecology”

Here is Gary Snyder's own selection of his pathbreaking environmental essays, Buddhist journals, poetic notebooks, and more, including previously uncollected material

Gathered for the first time in a single volume and completing the definitive Library of America edition of his works, here is the essential prose of our “poet laureate of deep ecology”: philosophical essays, travel journals, poetic notebooks, reflections on Buddhism, environmental polemics, memoirs, speeches, interviews, letters, and other writings spanning the entire arc of Snyder’s lauded, seventy-year career. All of Snyder’s published prose collections are represented, omitting only items he feels are repetitious or merely occasional, followed by a selection of from his private journals. The volume includes:
Earth House Hold: describing his life as a fire lookout in Washington State in the early 1950s, and his experiences as an initiate in a Kyoto monastery “Poetry and the Primitive," a kind of “ecological survival technique" “Buddhism and the Coming Revolution," which imagines the “nation-shaking implications” of spiritual discovery He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village, charting Snyder's deep engagements with Native American mythology Passage Through India: about a six-month pilgrimage with his wife and the poet Allen Ginsberg, culminating in a meeting with the Dalai Lama. The Practice of the Wild: a classic of American environmental writing in the tradition of Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Annie Dillard The essays in A Place in Space and Back on the Fire: exploring bioregionalism, forestry practices, sustainability, and the ecosystems of the Sierra Nevada, where Snyder has lived since 1970 The Great Clod: a mediation on the intersections of nature and culture in Asian history and literature. It's all here, the profound reflections and inspiring meditations of our greatest living guide to the nature of meaning and the meaning of nature.

Back on the Fire: Essays

by Gary Snyder

Following The Practice of the Wild, this new collection of essays by Gary Snyder blazes with insight. In his most autobiographical writing to date, these essays employ fire as a metaphor for the crucial moment when deeply held viewpoints yield to new experiences, and our spirits and minds broaden and mature. Snyder here writes and riffs on a wide range of topics, from explorations of southwestern European Paleolithic cave art to his own personal poetic history with haiku; from reminiscences of youthful West Coast logging and trail crew days to talks given in Paris and Tokyo on art and archetypes. He honors poets of his generation, like Philip Whalen and Allen Ginsberg, and meditates on art, labor, and the making of families, houses, and homesteads.
This is a work that requires us to make friends with impermanence and error — to make "wildfire" a partner — and to keep burning the hazardous, the excess, and even one's own dreams and attainments, over and over again. The final impression is holistic: We perceive not a collection of essays, but a cohesive presentation of Snyder's life and work expressed in his characteristically straightforward prose.

Back on the Fire: Essays

by Gary Snyder

This collection of essays by Gary Snyder, now in paperback, blazes with insight. In his most autobiographical writing to date, Snyder employs fire as a metaphor for the crucial moment when deeply held viewpoints yield to new experiences, and our spirits and minds broaden and mature. Snyder here writes and riffs on a wide range of topics, from our sense of place and a need to review forestry practices, to the writing life and Eastern thought. Surveying the current wisdom that fires are in some cases necessary for ecosystems of the wild, he contemplates the evolution of his view on the practice, while exploring its larger repercussions on our perceptions of nature and the great landscapes of the West. These pieces include recollections of his boyhood, his involvement with the literary community of the Bay Area, his travels to Japan, as well as his thoughts on American culture today. All maintain Snyder's reputation as an intellect to be reckoned with, while often revealing him at his most emotionally vulnerable. The final impression is holistic: We perceive not a collection of essays, but a cohesive presentation of Snyder's life and work expressed in his characteristically straightforward prose.

Cold Mountain Poems

by Gary Snyder, Hanshan

The best of Hanshan's beloved poems—among the earliest of Zen-style Buddhist poetry, beloved by the Beat Generation—here newly translated and organized thematically in a beautiful Pocket Poets hardcover

Often ranked among the most inspiring works of world literature, the poems of Hanshan (whose name means Cold Mountain), were traditionally thought to have been written at least twelve centuries ago on rock walls by a Buddhist monk living in the mountains of southeastern China. The best of his poems, collected here and organized by theme, reflect the sense of humor, deep love of solitude, and vivid descriptions of nature that have endeared these poems to generations of readers.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

Cold Mountain Poems

by Gary Snyder, Hanshan

In 1953, Gary Snyder returned to the Bay Area and, at age 23, enrolled in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, to study Asian languages and culture. He intensified his study of Chinese and Japanese, and taking up the challenge of one of his professors, Chen Shih-hsiang, he began to work on translating a largely unknown poet by the name of Han Shan, a writer with whom the professor thought Snyder might feel a special affinity. The results were magical. As Patrick Murphy noted, "These poems are something more than translations precisely because Snyder renders them as a melding of Han Shan's Chinese Ch'an Buddhist mountain spirit trickster mentality and Snyder's own mountain wilderness meditation and labor activities." The suite of 24 poems was published in the 1958 issue of The Evergreen Review, and the career of one of America's greatest poets was launched.

In 1972, Press-22 issued a beautiful edition of these poems written out by hand in italic by Michael McPherson. We are doing a new augments edition based on the old, with a new design, a preface by Lu Ch'iu-yin, and an afterword by Mr. Snyder where he discusses how he came to this work and what it meant to his development as a writer and Buddhist.

On May 11, 2012, for the Stronach Memorial Lecture at The University of California, more than fifty years after his days there as a student, Snyder offered a public lecture reflecting on Chinese poetry, Han Shan, and his continuing work as a poet and translator. This remarkable occasion was recorded and we are including a CD of it in our edition, making this the most definitive edition of Cold Mountain Poems ever published.

Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry & Gary Snyder

by Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry

"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 Chronicle

"In Distant Neighbors, both Berry and Snyder come across as honest and open-hearted explorers. There is an overall sense that they possess a deep and questing wisdom, hard earned through land work, travel, writing, and spiritual exploration. There is no rushing, no hectoring, and no grand gestures between these two, just an ever-deepening inquiry into what makes a good life and how to live it, even in the depths of the machine age." ―Orion Magazine

In 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 published his first book of essays, Earth House Hold. A few years before, after a long absence, Wendell Berry left New York City to return to land near his grandfather's farm in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he built a small studio and lived there with his wife as they restored an old house on their newly acquired homestead. In 1969 Berry had just published Long-Legged House. These two founding members of the counterculture and of the new environmental movement had yet to meet, but they knew each other's work, and soon they began a correspondence. Neither man could have imagined the impact their work would have on American political and literary culture, nor could they have appreciated the impact they would have on one another.
Snyder had thrown over all vestiges of Christianity in favor of becoming a devoted Buddhist and Zen practitioner, and had lived in Japan for a prolonged period to develop this practice. Berry's discomfort with the Christianity of his native land caused him to become something of a renegade Christian, troubled by the church and organized religion, but grounded in its vocabulary and its narrative. Religion and spirituality seemed like a natural topic for the two men to discuss, and discuss they did. They exchanged more than 240 letters from 1973 to 2013, remarkable letters of insight and argument. The two bring out the best in each other, as they grapple with issues of faith and reason, discuss ideas of home and family, worry over the disintegration of community and commonwealth, and share the details of the lives they've chosen to live with their wives and children. Contemporary American culture is the landscape they reside on. Environmentalism, sustainability, global politics and American involvement, literature, poetry and progressive ideals, these two public intellectuals address issues as broad as are found in any exchange in literature.
No one can be unaffected by the complexity of their relationship, the subtlety of their arguments, and the grace of their friendship. This is a book for the ages.

Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder

by Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry

"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 Chronicle

"In Distant Neighbors, both Berry and Snyder come across as honest and open-hearted explorers. There is an overall sense that they possess a deep and questing wisdom, hard earned through land work, travel, writing, and spiritual exploration. There is no rushing, no hectoring, and no grand gestures between these two, just an ever-deepening inquiry into what makes a good life and how to live it, even in the depths of the machine age." ―Orion Magazine

In 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 published his first book of essays, Earth House Hold. A few years before, after a long absence, Wendell Berry left New York City to return to land near his grandfather's farm in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he built a small studio and lived there with his wife as they restored an old house on their newly acquired homestead. In 1969 Berry had just published Long-Legged House. These two founding members of the counterculture and of the new environmental movement had yet to meet, but they knew each other's work, and soon they began a correspondence. Neither man could have imagined the impact their work would have on American political and literary culture, nor could they have appreciated the impact they would have on one another.
Snyder had thrown over all vestiges of Christianity in favor of becoming a devoted Buddhist and Zen practitioner, and had lived in Japan for a prolonged period to develop this practice. Berry's discomfort with the Christianity of his native land caused him to become something of a renegade Christian, troubled by the church and organized religion, but grounded in its vocabulary and its narrative. Religion and spirituality seemed like a natural topic for the two men to discuss, and discuss they did. They exchanged more than 240 letters from 1973 to 2013, remarkable letters of insight and argument. The two bring out the best in each other, as they grapple with issues of faith and reason, discuss ideas of home and family, worry over the disintegration of community and commonwealth, and share the details of the lives they've chosen to live with their wives and children. Contemporary American culture is the landscape they reside on. Environmentalism, sustainability, global politics and American involvement, literature, poetry and progressive ideals, these two public intellectuals address issues as broad as are found in any exchange in literature.
No one can be unaffected by the complexity of their relationship, the subtlety of their arguments, and the grace of their friendship. This is a book for the ages.

This Present Moment: New Poems

by Gary Snyder

"This present moment
That lives on

To become

Long ago."

For his first collection of new poems since his celebrated Danger on Peaks, published in 2004, Gary Snyder finds himself ranging over the planet. Journeys to the Dolomites, to the north shore of Lake Tahoe, from Paris and Tuscany to the shrine at Delphi, from Santa Fe to Sella Pass, Snyder lays out these poems as a map of the last decade. Placed side-by-side, they become a path and a trail of complexity and lyrical regard, a sort of riprap of the poet’s eighth decade. And in the mix are some of the most beautiful domestic poems of his great career, poems about his work as a homesteader and householder, as a father and husband, as a friend and neighbor. A centerpiece in this collection is a long poem about the death of his beloved, Carole Koda, a rich poem of grief and sorrow, rare in its steady resolved focus on a dying wife, of a power unequaled in American poetry.

As a friend is quoted in one of these new poems:

"I met the other lately in the far back of a bar,
musicians playing near the window and he
sweetly told me “listen to that music.

The self we hold so dear will soon be gone.”"

Gary Snyder is one of the greatest American poets of the last century, and This Present Moment shows his command, his broad range, and his remarkable courage.

This Present Moment: New Poems

by Gary Snyder

"This present moment
That lives on

To become

Long ago."

For his first collection of new poems since his celebrated Danger on Peaks, published in 2004, Gary Snyder finds himself ranging over the planet. Journeys to the Dolomites, to the north shore of Lake Tahoe, from Paris and Tuscany to the shrine at Delphi, from Santa Fe to Sella Pass, Snyder lays out these poems as a map of the last decade. Placed side-by-side, they become a path and a trail of complexity and lyrical regard, a sort of riprap of the poet’s eighth decade. And in the mix are some of the most beautiful domestic poems of his great career, poems about his work as a homesteader and householder, as a father and husband, as a friend and neighbor. A centerpiece in this collection is a long poem about the death of his beloved, Carole Koda, a rich poem of grief and sorrow, rare in its steady resolved focus on a dying wife, of a power unequaled in American poetry.

As a friend is quoted in one of these new poems:

"I met the other lately in the far back of a bar,
musicians playing near the window and he
sweetly told me “listen to that music.

The self we hold so dear will soon be gone.”"

Gary Snyder is one of the greatest American poets of the last century, and This Present Moment shows his command, his broad range, and his remarkable courage.

Mountains and Rivers Without End

by Gary Snyder

Begun in Berkeley on April 8, 1956, Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End is an epic of geology, prehistory, and mythology. The poems travel beyond Western traditions to encompass Asian art and drama, Native American performance and storytelling, and the practice of Zen Buddhism. It is a moving celebration of earth and sky, rock and water, nature and humanity from one of America's finest poets.

When the first edition of this landmark work was published in 1996, Gary Snyder was honored with the Bollingen Poetry Prize, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award from the The Los Angeles Times, the Orion Society's John Hay Award, and many other awards. In this new edition, including a three CD set of the poet reading, we celebrate again the brilliance of one of our most important poets.

Danger on Peaks: The Deluxe Audio Edition

by Gary Snyder

We are proud to continue our project of publishing Deluxe Audio Editions of the poems of Gary Snyder, read by him. When first published in 2004, it was the poet’s first new collection of poems in twenty years. Perhaps his most personal, autobiographical collection, it begins with the young poet ascending Mt. St. Helens in 1945, a climb accidentally timed with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was 15 years old. Almost sixty years later, after the great Buddhas at Bamiyan Valley were bombed and with the victims of the World Trade Center also “turned to dust,” the poet composed a prayer while at Short Grass Temple in Senso-ji, a pilgrim on the path of Kannon, Goddess of Mercy.

This remarkable collection was greeted with broad praise, and as Julia Martin proclaimed, “Moving between relative and absolute ways of seeing, [Snyder] responds to the experience of global conflict and personal pain by reminding readers of the continuity of wildness, affirming the value of art, and invoking an ancient practice of wisdom and compassion.”

The Great Clod: Notes and Memoirs on Nature and History in East Asia

by Gary Snyder

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet of Turtle Island: a meditative, scholarly memoir of Asia―“a book . . . not quite like any other but trademark Snyder” (Kirkus Reviews).
Over the course of his singular career, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, essayist, environmental activist, and Beat icon Gary Snyder has derived wisdom and inspiration from his study of Eastern philosophies, cultures, and art. Now, with this collection of eight essays, Snyder offers “a deceptively small book enfolding a lifetime’s worth of study” (Kirkus Reviews).
The Great Clod is the culmination of a project that Snyder began in 1969 with the essay ‘Summer in Hokkaido,’ first published in Coevolution Quarterly. In it and the subsequent entries, most of which are published here for the first time, Snyder weaves together elements of travel memoir and poetic insight with scholarly meditations on civilization’s relationship to the environment. The result is a seamless exploration of Asia that ranges from Hokkaido to Kyoto, from the Ainu to the Mongols, from the landscapes of China to the backcountry of Japan, and from the temples of Daitokoji to the Yellow River Valley.
Here you will find “a series of essays on Asia’s ecological history, combining culture and politics in a way that is, unsurprisingly, poetic and graceful” (Japan Times).

Dooby Lane: Also Known as Guru Road, A Testament Inscribed in Stone Tablets by DeWayne Williams

by Gary Snyder

If left alone, what might a place say? If we must leave it, what must we leave behind? Guru Road, Dooby Lane. It was in this place where, nearly twenty years ago, Gary Snyder discovered, considered, and chronicled such latitudinal ruminations by way of one man, DeWayne “Dooby” Williams, and the coalesced stories and tributes which Williams faithfully etched upon granite, his elected canvas. When Snyder and his wife, Carole, were camping along the Black Rock playa, northwest of the Great Basin and northeast of the town of Gerlach, they deviated from their journey down a paved path to explore a little dirt road that glinted with intrigue. This spontaneous decision led Snyder to “this remarkable text of life and spirit” and to Williams who, retired and living with cancer, was creating the testament of a lifetime—that which would transcend corporeal measures and touch the lives of countless people in endless moments for many years to come.

DeWayne Williams created this work of Earth Art in the Black Rock desert, near the current site of the Burning Man gathering. This full-color book presents a series of photographs by Peter Goin, accompanied by the prose and poetry of Gary Snyder.

Tawny Grammar: Essays

by Gary Snyder

Two beautifully paired essays, "Tawny Grammar" and "Good, Wild, Sacred," serve to offer an autobiographical framework for Gary Snyder's long work as a poet, environmentalist, and a leader of the Buddhist community in North America.

He begins standing outside a community hall in Portland, Oregon, in 1943 and concludes as a homesteader in the backcountry of Northern California more than forty-five years later. A wonderful introduction to Gary Snyder, this will also serve to remind his faithful readers of the thrill of his insights and his commitments crucial to our future on Turtle Island.

Each palm-size book in the Counterpoints series is meant to stay with you, whether safely in your pocket or long after you turn the last page. From short stories to essays to poems, these little books celebrate our most-beloved writers, whose work encapsulates the spirit of Counterpoint Press: cutting-edge, wide-ranging, and independent.

Uncollected Poems, Drafts, Fragments, and Translations

by Gary Snyder

Finalist in CALIBA's 2022 Golden Poppy Book Awards

A 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 magazines or as broadsides, including Spel Against Demons, Dear Mr. President, Hymn to the Goddess San Francisco, Smokey the Bear Sutra, A Curse on the Men in Washington, Pentagon. The collection also includes a great number of translations from Chinese and Japanese poets. Much of this work has been gleaned from journals, manuscripts and correspondence, and never before published in any form.

He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth, With a Foreword by Richard Bringhurst and a New Afterword by the Author

by Gary Snyder

In 1951, as a student of anthropology in Oregon, Gary Snyder set himself to the task of analyzing the many levels of meaning a single Native American myth might hold. He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village is the result of Snyder's critical look at a Haida tale that was told by the great oral poet Ghandl (Walter McGregor) to John Swanton sometime before 1905. A version of the ubiquitous “swan maiden” story, it tells of a chief's son who falls in love with a wild goose-girl, loses her, follows her into the sky, and returns to land as a seagull. Snyder goes deep into the transformations that occur in the myth, considering versions of myth from around the world, and explaining how the story might apply here and now. He writes:

To go beyond and become what-a seagull on a reef? Why not. Our nature is no particular nature; look out across the beach at the gulls. For an empty moment while their soar and cry enters your heart like sunshaft through water, you are that, totally. We do this every day. So this is the aspect of mind that gives art, style, and self-transcendence to the inescapable human plantedness in a social and ecological nexus. The challenge is to do it well, by your neighbors and by the trees, and that maybe once in a great while we can get where we see through the same eye at the same time, for a moment. That would be doing it well. Old tales and myths and stories are the k_ans of the human race.

The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations

by Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder has been a major cultural force in America for five decades—prize-winning poet, environmental activist, Zen Buddhist, earth-householder, and reluctant counterculture guru. Having expanded far beyond the Beat scene that first brought his work to the public ear and eye, Snyder has produced a broad-ranging body of work that encompasses his fluency in Eastern literature and culture, his commitment to the environment, and his concepts of humanity’s place in the cosmos.

Prose selections include journals from his travels to Saigon, Singapore, Kyoto, Ceylon, New Delhi, and Dharamshala; key interviews from the East West Journal and The Paris Review, meditations on Buddhism and the surrender of self; a cultural survey of communal living; and notes from the lookout tower on Sourdough Mountain, where in stark isolation Snyder once watched for forest fires.

The Reader gathers poems from each phase of Snyder’s long career—from his fist collection, Riprap, to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Turtle Island, through his epic poem cycle that was forty years in the making, Mountains and Rivers Without End.

From freighter to firetower, Zendo to Himalayan mountain ridge, Snyder’s writings reflect a lifetime of study, journey, and the practice of everyday mindfulness. Gary Snyder has witnessed and captured our culture at the hinge of change and—time and again—his work has transformed us just as it has altered our understanding of literature and place in a purposeful life.

The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder

by Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder

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 1956 and continuing through 1995, the two men exchanged more than 850 letters. Bill Morgan, Ginsberg's biographer and an important editor of his papers, has selected the most significant correspondence from this long friendship. The letters themselves paint the biographical and poetic portraits of two of America's most important — and most fascinating — poets.

Tamalpais Walking: Poetry, History, and Prints

by Gary Snyder, Tom Killion

In a new collaboration by the authors of the bestselling The High Sierra of California, readers are introduced to the unique mountain overlooking San Francisco Bay. A source of story and myth since time began, Mt. Tamalpais has inspired conservationists, trail builders, botanists, artists, and poets for more than a century. With freshness and sustained delight, Tamalpais Walking explores Mt. Tamalpais’s natural, cultural, historic, and spiritual dimensions. It is a book shaped by two master craftsmen collaborating on an enterprise nurtured by long and passionate involvement. The artwork is the product of Tom Killion’s decades of depicting and interpreting the mountain’s many moods and aspects. Gary Snyder has been hiking Mt. Tamalpais since 1948, and through poetry and a new, revealing essay he offers his thoughts on the mountain, its history, and the practice of walking meditation. Further enriched with Killion’s essays on the mountain’s history and selections from the work of Jack Kerouac, Ina Coolbrith, Kenneth Rexroth, and Lew Welch, Tamalpais Walking takes us deep into Mt. Tamalpais’s pathways, offering original, revelatory views of a mountain prominent not just on the landscape but in the history and imagination of the West Coast.

California's Wild Coast Poetry, Prints, and History

by Gary Snyder

Gold Medal Winner, California Book Awards

Winner, NCIBA Book of the Year Award

Winner, Northern California Book Reviewers Recognition Award

A show-stopping collaboration between artist Tom Killion & poet Gary Snyder with writings by Robinson Jeffers, Robert Hass, Jaime de Angulo, and more.

Previously published as California's Wild Edge: The Coast in Prints, Poetry, and History, this volume captures the beauty of the California coast from Mendocino, Point Reyes, and the San Francisco Bay down through Carmel, Big Sur, Santa Barbara, and Santa Monica. Woodcut artist Tom Killion's prints (over 90 in this collection) combine exquisite color with dynamic composition to portray the coast's ever-changing moods and diverse formations: storm tides crashing at Point Lobos, serene moonlit coves at Mendocino, fog encircling the Golden Gate Bridge. Deepening our experience are poetry and prose from Gary Snyder, as well as selections from Native Californian traditional stories, accounts of travelers, and poems by Robinson Jeffers, Robert Hass, and Jaime de Angulo. As Tamalpais Walking and The High Sierra of California did for lovers of mountains, California's Wild Coast will delight anyone who has seen (or wants to see) the meeting of land and the Pacific.

Smokey the Bear Sutra

by Gary Snyder

An impassioned poem with Buddhist imagery and messages of environmentalism, social justice, and enlightenment.

Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Gary Snyder composed Smokey the Bear Sutra" one spring night in 1969 at a Sierra Club conference. Smokey the Bear is not the U.S. Forest Service's Smokey Bear, the latter being a highly recognized advertising symbol protected by Federal law. Rather, the imagery of this Smokey comes from Buddhism; according to Snyder, Smokey the Bear Sutra is a dharma protector, modeled after Fugo, the Japanese patron of ascetics and yogis. The message of the Sutra is that we as beings are responsible to protect all other life down to the smallest forms-- do no harm, protect our collective selves, and honor the great impermanence.

This short work is part of Applewood's American Roots series, tactile mementos of American passions by some of America's most famous writers.

The Back Country

by Gary Snyder

This 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 Tibetan Buddhism; and "Back"--poems done on his return to this country in 1964 which look again at our West with the eyes of India and Japan. The book concludes with a group of translations of the Japanese poet Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933), with whose work Snyder feels a close affinity. The title, The Back Country, has three major associations; wilderness. the "backward" countries, and the "back country" of the mind with its levels of being in the unconscious.