![]() | |
| "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are included, omitting only items he feels are repetitious or merely occasional, followed by a selection of previously unpublished private journals. Earth House Hold opens with the notebooks Snyder kept as a fire lookout in the mountains of Washington State in the early 1950s, and describes his experiences as an initiate in a Kyoto monastery; in "Poetry and the Primitive" he considers his vocation as a kind of "ecological survival technique," and in "Buddhism and the Coming Revolution" he imagines the "nation-shaking implications" of spiritual discovery. Selections from He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village and other pieces reflect his engagements with Native American mythology; Passage Through India recounts a six-month pilgrimage with his wife and the poet Allen Ginsberg, culminating in a meeting with the Dalai Lama. Snyder's The Practice of the Wild is a classic of American environmental writing in the tradition of Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Annie Dillard-an "exquisite, far-sighted articulation of what freedom, wildness, and grace mean, using the lessons of the planet to teach us how to live," as Gretel Ehrlich put it. The essays in A Place in Space and Back on the Fire explore bioregionalism, forestry practices, sustainability, and the ecosystems of the Sierra Nevada, where Snyder has lived since 1970; The Great Clod meditates on the intersections of nature and culture in Asian history and literature. Also included are explanatory note |
|
|
