Danger on Peaks: Poems

by Gary Snyder

Overview

When first published in 2004, Danger on Peaks was the poet's first new collection of poems in twenty years. Perhaps his most personal, autobiographical collection, it begins with the young poet ascending Mt. St. Helens in 1945, a climb accidentally timed with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was 15 years old. Almost sixty years later, after the great Buddhas at Bamiyan Valley were bombed and with the victims of the World Trade Center also "turned to dust," the poet composed a prayer while at Short Grass Temple in Senso–ji, a pilgrim on the path of Kannon, Goddess of Mercy.



This remarkable collection was greeted with broad praise, and as Julia Martin proclaimed, "Moving between relative and absolute ways of seeing, [Snyder] responds to the experience of global conflict and personal pain by reminding readers of the continuity of wildness, affirming the value of art, and invoking an ancient practice of wisdom and compassion."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619024052
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	09/22/2014
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	92
File size:	971 KB

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.

Read an Excerpt

For Carole
I first saw her in the zendo
at meal time— unwrapping bowls
head forward folding back the cloth
as server I was kneeling
to fill three sets of bowls each time
up the line
Her lithe leg
proud, skeptical,
passionate, trained
by the heights— by the danger on peaks

Table of Contents

I.	Mount St. Helens
	The Mountain	5
	The Climb	7
	Atomic Dawn	9
	Some Fate	10
	1980: Letting Go	11
	Blast Zone	13
	To Ghost Lake	16
	Pearly Everlasting	19
	Enjoy the Day	21
II.	Yet Older Matters
	Brief Years	25
	Glacier Ghosts	35
III.	Daily Life
	What to Tell, Still	41
	Strong Spirit	43
	Sharing an Oyster With the Captain	45
	Summer of '97	47
	Really the Real	50
	Ankle-deep in Ashes	52
	Winter Almond	53
	Mariano Vallejo's Library	55
	Waiting for a Ride	56
IV.	Steady, They Say
	Doctor Coyote When He Had a Problem	59
	Claws/Cause	60
	How Many?	61
	Loads on the Road	62
	Carwash Time	63
	To All the Girls Whose Ears I Pierced Back Then	64
	She Knew All About Art	65
	Coffee, Market, Blossoms	66
	In the Santa Clarita Valley	67
	Almost Okay Now	68
	Sus	69
	Day's Driving Done	70
	Snow Flies, Burn Brush, Shut Down	71
	Icy Mountains Constantly Walking	72
	For Philip Zenshin Whalen	73
	For Carole	74
	Steady, They Say	75
V.	Dust in the Wind
	Gray Squirrels	79
	One Day in Late Summer	80
	Spilling the Wind	81
	California Laurel	82
	Baking Bread	83
	One Empty Bus	84
	No Shadow	85
	Shandel	86
	Night Herons	87
	The Acropolis Back When	88
	The Emu	89
	The Hie Shrine and the "One-Tree" District	91
	Cormorants	92
	To Go	93
	One Thousand Cranes	94
	For Anthea Corinne Snyder Lowry	96
	The Great Bell of the Gion	97
VI.	After Bamiyan
	After Bamiyan	101
	Loose on Earth	103
	Falling from a Height, Holding Hands	104
	Senso-ji	105
	Envoy	107
	Notes	109
	Thanks	111
	Acknowledgments	112

Editorial Reviews

In his first gathering of new poetry since the 1996 book-length poem Mountains and Rivers Without End, Snyder seeks a kind of fraught peace, which he cannot sustain; the book begins and ends in upheaval. A mostly prose sequence recalls the recent history of Mount Saint Helens, the Washington State volcano whose eruption in 1980 has been recently (and for now, more softly) reprised. Snyder's speaker remembers climbing it decades ago and sees how flora and fauna are already returning there now: "Who wouldn't take the chance to climb a snowpeak and get the long view?" Landscape, geology, botany and ecology; the poet's Buddhist outlook and its consequences for ethics, and the small pleasures of daily existence, inform the understated, short poems making up most of the volume. Snyder excels in adapting Japanese forms, such as haibun, to American usage. Many of his short poems recall the people-friends, lovers, a daughter-for whom Snyder cares or has cared, an attractive surprise in a poet known more for his rapport with nonhuman nature. Last come five short poems prompted by world events, including the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in spring 2001 and the terrorist attacks later that year: Snyder reminds us that humans are animals too, "beings, living or not," "inside or outside of time." (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

While Snyder's first collection of new poetry in over 20 years is long overdue, it's unlikely this book will garner any prizes. As Snyder himself admits, "most of my work/ such as it is/ is done." This, then, is a book about the past-celebrating and mourning at the same time. A portrait of the poet chopping a fallen tree so his 87-year-old mother can get her car out is one of his most memorable poems, but the majority are bleaker and less tender. The world, as Snyder depicted it so beautifully yet sparsely in his almost Utopian early work, has not lived up to its promise, yet his trademark koanlike style has not shifted to accommodate this landscape of Denny's, McDonald's, and laser printers. Visiting Mount St. Helen's after the volcano erupted, he recalls hiking there years ago, but the voice in the prose poem meditation remains static, giving little indication of a changed, hostile landscape. The Taliban's destruction of ancient Buddhas provokes deeper thought than the Taliban's role in the World Trade Center disaster. Despite these reservations, any new work by Snyder is a crucial library purchase.-Rochelle Ratner, formerly with SoHo Weekly News, New York Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal