- Paperback: 176 pages
- Publisher: Counterpoint Press; Reprint edition (Sep 1 1997)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1887178570
- ISBN-13: 978-1887178570
- Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 12.2 x 1.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 136 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,284,850 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
A magnificent achievement, this epic poem belies the common take that Snyder's poetic career is notable mainly in the past tense and is refracted by the works of others. Without doubt, Snyder's exploration of nature, Zen Buddhism and his travels through unexplored corners of American society influenced the Beat writers of the 1950s and early 1960s, and some of his early works (Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, 1965, and Turtle Island, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975) are masterpieces. This new, vital work sums up stylistic and thematic concerns by uniting 39 poems written between 1956 and 1996 (many published here for the first time) into a seamless whole that, like a modern Leaves of Grass, combines fascination with the varied particulars of the way people live with awe at the majesty of nature. Each of four sections is organized around a familiar Snyder focus: the demands made on people by nature and time ("The road that's followed goes forever;/ in half a minute crossed and left behind"); observation of the terrain he occupies ("Slash of calligraphy of freeways of cars") and various American landscapes ("trucks on the freeways,/ Kenworth, Peterbilt, Mack,/ rumble diesel depths,/ like boulders bumping in an outwash glacial river"); and subtle tributes to those who have survived the last 40 years ("At the end of the ice age/ we are the bears, we are the ravens,/ We are the salmon/ in the gravel/ At the end of an ice age"). A concluding essay, "The Making of Mountain and Rivers Without End," serves as an intellectual mini-autobiography and a gloss on some of the Eastern influences on the poem. This is a major work by a venerable master of post-WWII American poetry.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
When this landmark work was first published, Gary Snyder was honored with the Bollingen Poetry Prize, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Orion Societys John Hay Award. Publishers Weekly named Mountains and Rivers Without End one of the best books of 1996. On April 8, 1956, Gary Snyder began work on a long poem entitled Mountains and Rives Without End. Initially inspired by East Asian landscape painting and his own experience within a chaotic universe where everything is in place, Snyders vision was further stimulated by Asian art and drama, Gaia history, Native American performance and storytelling, the practice of Zen Buddhism, and the varied landscapes of Japan, California, Alaska, Australia, China, and Taiwan.While a few individual sections of the poem have been published in literary magazines and a small bound collection, Snyders ardent fans have waited patiently through the past forty years for the completion of Mountains and Rivers Without End. The entire work appears for the first time in this volume.Traveling beyond its origins in the Western tradition of Whitman, Pound, and Williams, Mountains and Rivers is an epic of geology, prehistory, and planetary mythologies. It is a poem about land and its processes, a book about wisdom, compassion, and myth, and a narrative work that is not quite like anything else. It will stand as a masterpiece of the long poem in American English.
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
A profound retrospective in which one man speaks for all,
By
This review is from: Mountains and Rivers Without End (Paperback)
Written over forty years, MOUNTAINS AND RIVERS WITHOUT END is poet Gary Snyder's highest achievment. Here he has presented a perception of the world that has taken four decades of experience to put into words. The collection moves chronologically from Snyder's glimpse in the 50's of a Japanese scroll that gave the book its name, though his wanderings in the American West, and into senescene.Decades of travel have exposure Snyder to so much of our planet, and this experience forms a major part of MOUNTAINS AND RIVERS WITHOUT END. Mixing ecological perspective with Buddhist metaphysics, these poems are a powerful description of Man's relationship with the planet. Snyder is supremely aware of how attached mankind is to the Earth, and how its ever-surrounding landscape influences peoples. The final poem "Finding the Space in the Heart" is a moving retrospective of Gary Snyder's forty years as a writer, from his Beat poet days in the 1950's to the older man that he is now, using elements of Buddhism's Prajnaparamita-sutra, the so called "Heart Sutra." While Snyder's poems sometimes do not succeed due to clumsy meter, a lacking that makes me give this work only four stars, they often move the reader with their sincerity and signifance. MOUNTAINS AND RIVERS WITHOUT END is certainly worth a read.
4.0 out of 5 stars
And Rivers End Without Mountains,
By
This review is from: Mountains and Rivers Without End (Paperback)
I have some ambivalence about giving Snyder 5 stars for this work. I come to this collection of poems after reading "Turtle Island", which I liked better overall. It had a bit more of the wide-eyed innocence that makes the poetry more heart-felt to me, even with that whole section at the end dedicated to prose on how to make the world a better place.I found several poems in "Mountains..." that I like better than the ones in "Turtle Island" - particularly pieces like "Ma", which takes the form of a letter from a mother to son. What I didn't like so much was the pervasive use of East Indian and Oriental terms, much of which had little meaning to me. Recognizing a certain desire on Snyder's part to "disorient" a traveller through the literature helped somewhat. But often I felt Snyder was abusing his "superstar" status to make these foreign phrases seem more important than they actually are. How difficult can it be to just say what you want to say without resorting to another language? Snyder certainly has many tools at his disposal - the sum of which comes under the heading of "Poetic License". Admittedly, languages are not solid, and new words creep in all the time. Perhaps Snyder feels he is just doing his part to force the issue with regard to some patterns of thought he wants insinnuated into western english. But I don't think it comes off that way all the time. Many times it just sounds like: "Aren't I clever to come up with this deep-meaning foreign phrase that you don't understand". This detracted some from the total effect in the book. Ultimately, that's just me of course. One must do one's own thinking on these matters. And since I gave the thing 4 stars, it obviously still comes highly recomended from my viewpoint.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Golden nugget,
This review is from: Mountains and Rivers Without End (Paperback)
Golden nugget from Sierra streams. Gold never rusts.
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