Axe Handles: Poems

by Gary Snyder

Overview

In Axe Handles Mr. Snyder reveals the roots of community in the family and explores the transmission of cultural values and knowledge.

"In making the handle of an axe by cutting wood with an axe the model is indeed near at hand." In exploring this axiom of Lu Ji's, Gary Snyder continues:

I am an axe

And my son a handle, soon

To be shaping again, model

And tool, craft of culture,

How we go on.

This is a collection of discovery, of insight, and of vision. These poems see the roots of community in the family, and the roots of culture and government in the community.

Formally, the 71 poems in Axe Handles range from lyrics to riddles to narratives. The collection is divided into three parts, called "Loops," "Little Songs for Gaia," and "Nets," each containing poems of disciplined clarity. Gary Snyder knows well the great power of silence in a poem, silence that allows the mind space enough to discover the magic of song.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781593760571
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	01/28/2005
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	126
Product dimensions:	5.48(w) x 8.26(h) x 0.36(d)

About the Author

Gary Snyder is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry and prose. Since 1970 he has lived in the watershed of the South Yuba River in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, Snyder has also been awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry and the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award. His 1992 collection, No Nature, was a National Book Award finalist, and in 2008 he received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Snyder is a poet, environmentalist, educator and Zen Buddhist.

Editorial Reviews

Axe Handles presents poems that reflect a fine balance between physical reality and inner insight. Snyder emphasizes natural cycles, sees the oneness of things rather than their separateness, observes directly without pretense or arrogance ... His sense of the history of land and cultures and his ability to write as both the Worker and the Thinker create a fertile whole.

Los Angeles Times Book Review