Nature writing, as Thoreau knew, can be deeply subversive because it points to ways of living that diverge fundamentally from dominant attitudes. Thoreau would have welcomed these essays by America's most important nature writers, for in exploring our intrinsic relationship with the earth, they also consider our alienation from nature and how that alienation is manifested.
The book's principal focus is on the possibilities of being at home on the earth: Finding place, reinhabitation, and becoming native.The collection begins with essays by N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko, who...

"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.

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...

"Wild nature as the ultimate ground of human affairs" the beautiful, precarious balance among forces and species forms a unifying theme for the new poems in this collection. The title, Regarding Wave, reflects "a half-buried series of word origins dating back through the Indo-European language: intersections of energy, woman, song and 'Gone Beyond Wisdom.'" Central to the work is a cycle of songs for Snyder's wife, Masa, and their first son, Kai. Probing even further than Snyder's previous collection of poems, The Back Country, this new volume freshly explores "the most archaic values on...

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.

Beneath a Single Moon is an extraordinary collection of the work of forty-five contemporary American poets--with over 250 poems and thirty essays on the influence of spiritual practice on the practice of poetry. Included are works by John Cage, Diane di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Jane Hirshfield, Andrew Schelling, Gary Snyder, Anne Waldman, and others.

Gary Snyder has been a major cultural force in America for five decades-prize-winning poet, environmental activist, Zen Buddhist, and reluctant counterculture guru. Having expanded far beyond the Beat poems that first brought his work into the public eye, Snyder has produced a wide-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. The Gary Snyder Reader showcases the panoramic range of his literary vision in a single-volume survey that will appeal to students and general...

In 1962, after studying Buddhism in Japan, Gary Snyder, with his former wife, the poet Joanne Kyger, joined Allen Ginsberg and his companion Peter Orlovsky for a long trip to India "to see the hearth-land of the Buddha's teachings."

Snyder kept extensive journals of his travels and, in this particular case, also wrote the whole account in one long letter to his sister. Passage Through India brings both together in celebration of and reverence for India and its teachings. As Snyder writes in his original preface, "I honor India for many things: those neolithic cattle breeders who...