there have been many halfway-decent reviews of gary snyder’s new book, danger on peaks, in various newspapers. i was excited when i saw that the seattle times finally gave it some ink, seattle being the root of many things like mountaineering and modern counter-culture. but, as i started to read, i thought it would be just kind of another generic review. i thought i’d have to keep looking for some good interviews with gary and all that. well, i was premature in my disappointment. the second half of the article has some nice stuff from a phone interview with gary and some good research.
“After I finished ‘Mountains and Rivers Without End,’” he said, in his deliberate and authoritative bass voice, “I had the feeling that it didn’t matter if I did any more poetry or not. I returned to writing just for fun. As I worked with a mix of prose and short poems, I recalled [Japanese haiku master] Basho.”
“Danger on Peaks” is written in a form called haibun, in which passages of prose crystallize into lyric poems. As Snyder was working on the new poems, a geologist invited him to explore the blast zone at Mount St. Helens, which reminded him of his adolescent experience there.
“That shaped the rest of my life,” he said. “It put me on guard against the modern world, against the direction of militaristic and industrial governments of all sorts and to the dangers to the environment.”
Snyder’s lyric poems often are composed of condensed, imagistic nuggets from nature: “paw track, lizard-slither, tumble of/a single bounder down” (from “Claws/Cause”). “Danger on Peaks” proceeds with a more supple line, often through urban areas as well as the back country.
From Hiroshima, it arcs through three more “blasts” — Mount St. Helens, 9/11 and the Taliban’s demolition of the gigantic Buddhas in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley, offering a potent meditation on violence — and its antidote, compassion.
“The Bamiyan destruction prefigured what happened at the World Trade Center, which nobody has noticed,” declared the poet, linking, as always, culture to nature, the cooked to the raw, the image to the thing itself.
Snyder has lived since 1971 at Kitkitdizze, a pole-and-beam homestead with an open fireplace in the middle he built in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The new poems are peppered with the quotidian trivia of housekeeping, local politics, fatherhood (he is raising stepkids with his fourth wife), and being a famous poet.
In “What to Tell, Still,” he laments having to deal with a nefarious local lobbyist, rejoices in the clarity of a friend’s manuscript and glances with a sigh at another, “next in line for comment.”
Ever alert to shifts in the language, Snyder notes the freeway, I-5, which runs through California’s nearby Central Valley, is now called by locals “the five.” He contrasts the artificiality of its “gleaming bikes” and “huge BMW” with the “really the real world” of sandhill cranes in a flooded field.
“I’ve been labeled a beatnik, and I’ve been labeled a nature poet,” said Snyder. “But actually, I’m a Buddhist poet. And for Buddhists, all of reality is in its own terms natural. But the cranes are really the real world in the sense that ‘the five’ is impermanent on a different time scale. The cranes have been doing this migration [much longer], and it’s my fervent wish that they continue to be able to do it.”
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