You’ll have to forgive the dynamic lack in the titling of this book. It’s published by the premier non-profit publisher that preserves the most significant writings of U.S. authors using the most authoritative texts, in physical volumes that will endure. They often use simple and straightforward titles such as this one and Collected Poems, which was the other volume they published a few years ago by Gary Snyder.
Synder may be a Beatnik writer you recall. If you remember Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, the Gary Snyder stand-in was the fictional Japhy Ryder, climbing mountains while composing haiku. True enough of the real person. Snyder also spent several years in his twenties, post-college, in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, living in Japan, ordained as a Zen monk.
He is the only of the Beatnik writer generation still living — a nonagenarian Buddhist poet, ecological trailblazer, and writer of distinction who for three quarters of a century has led readers to focus on paying attention, wonder, reverence, and questing.
A quarter century ago we reviewed The Gary Snyder Reader (compiled by the same editor, who has also been the Zen ecologist’s faithful publisher all these years), and its contents are present in this volume as well, along with two hundred pages of more recent writing.
Snyder’s concerns always begin with and return to what is wild and free. But his interests also vary widely and include folk religion, geology, Japanese customs and Chinese history, Buddhist texts, haiku and koans, poetry, native peoples, mountains, and song and dance. Also Daoism — see the excerpt accompanying this review.
At his best, Snyder combines a Buddhist mind with what readers love about Henry David Thoreau, as when he writes “Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation.” In one of the previously unpublished essays included in this book, he begins with “I took up informal mountain walking meditations as a complement to my Zen practice” and goes on to explore topics such as “the Yamabushi ('those who stay in the mountains') are back country Shaman-Buddhists with strong Shinto connections, who make walking and climbing in deep mountain ranges a large part of their practice.”
We still need Gary Snyder and will for a long time to come.
