Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #398793 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Books in Canada
Pan-pacific Counter-culture and the mountainous backwoods are Gary Snyder’s preferred milieux. Of the same literary generation as Geoffrey Hill but self-schooled worlds away in the North Pacific Ring of Fire, Snyder has since the mid-1970s published only about one book of poems per decade-a mere trickle of books compared to the torrents of Hill. Danger on Peaks, the latest-and possibly last-is also his first free-standing collection since 1983, when Axe Handles came out (Left Out in the Rain, No Nature, and Mountains and Rivers without End were all books of a different sort: fugitive poems, new and selected poems, and a book-length poem, respectively).
For those who know Snyder’s work, there is nothing new in Danger, including its literary unevenness, but it is still a book worth reading; it contains a handful of throw-aways, but also some fair-to-middling things and some pretty good work, much of it in his deceptively simple rip-rap structures, and all of it tempered by a hard-earned Buddhist equanimity that contrasts strongly not only with Hill’s righteous Anglican anger, but also with Carson’s classical quasi-Catholic questioning. The tonal difference is only half the story, though, for Snyder’s literary cosmos is more capacious than theirs. Plants and animals as well as people inhabit his moral world and time for him is cosmic and geological as well as historical. His eyes may not be quite so original as Carson’s, but his eco-Buddhist vision is still sufficiently far from the Euro-american cultural norm that it often has a kind of poetic quality.
A quiet lyric in memory of the poet and Buddhist monk Philip Whalen, for example, focuses not on the gone friend, who is remembered only at a tangent, but on the transformation of 33 beetle-killed Ponderosa pine in their “moving on” to become “decking, shelving, siding, / stringers, studs, and joists.” Not even a simple 2x4 is too unimportant for Snyder’s poetic attention, since in his consciousness it was also once a wild tree and will one day be part of a human dwelling. One of Snyder’s great strengths as a “nature poet” is his capacious sense of nature, which, as he wrote in his preface to No Nature, is not limited to “the physical universe, including the urban, industrial, and toxic.” In the poem in question here, instead of the traditional lyric attempt to arrest time in a single ecstatic composition-which is in effect an attempt to separate the human from the natural world of flux and death-Snyder neatly uses the brief form to embed the human in the cosmic flow of material transformations and interdependencies. He will think of the trees, he says in closing and addressing them directly, “as you shelter people in the Valley / years to come” (Snyder’s italics).
Another poem, “Icy Mountains Constantly Walking” (dedicated to Seamus Heaney, who admires Snyder’s barehanded integrity), depicts Snyder reading his work in Ireland-“just the chirp of a bug”-and ends with a pair of images pondered on the flight home: “The rows of books / in the Long Hall at Trinity / The ranks of stony ranges / above the ice of Greenland.” That the mountains get the last word is characteristic Snyder, but so is the trust in both the things depicted and the reader; for the poem contains no allegorising of its images, no editorialising, no Wordsworthian injunction to quit books for Nature, no verbal pyrotechnics, but rather accepts both books and mountains as there, each with their own claims on human attention.
Neither of these two poems is literarily exciting of course-their matter is more compelling than their manner-and yet their images stay with a reader once the book is put away, just like the quiet images in the quiet poems left by Snyder’s East-Asian masters. Still, there are better poems (as poems) in Danger on Peaks, which in its six-part organization and its mix of verse and prose (some of it loosely modelled on Japanese forms like the poetic diary) is constantly shifting perspective between the close-up and the long view. The eruption of Mount St Helens in 1980, the Taliban’s destruction of the giant Buddhas in the Bamiyan valley, the al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center all find a place in this book, but so do the Pole Star’s cosmic drift, bits of PVC pipe, parking metres, bigrig drivers, and the remains of a baby jackrabbit eaten by an owl. Almost nothing escapes Snyder’s concern, and yet there’s no it’s-all-relative-dude flattening of values either. In a poem called “What to Tell, Still”, Snyder depicts himself as divided between his various commitments as a friend, a husband, a father, a citizen, and a poet, yet accepting the legitimate claims that others have on him and trying to answer them all in turn, by taking his turn in the car pool or writing advocacy letters and so on. Whether he has answered all of these claims or not is another matter (he has been divorced three times, apparently), and not a reviewer’s primary concern. The book in question can be recommended as an informative collection of small pleasures to anyone who appreciates clear-eyed eco-poetic perambulations or the sort of thing that Snyder wrote in response to northern lights seen in northern California in April 2001, a poem called “Flowers in the Night Sky”:

I thought, forest fires burning to the north!
yellow nomex jacket thrown in the cab, hard-hat, boots,
I gunned the truck up the dirt-road scrambling,
and came out on a flat stretch with a view:
shimmering blue-green streamers and a red glow down the sky-
Stop. Storms on the sun. Solar winds going by.

Iain Higgins (Books in Canada)

From Publishers Weekly
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."
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From Booklist
Snyder's first all-new collection since Axe Handles (1983) takes its title from the last line of a little poem about first seeing Carole, now his wife. It reveals one appetite flaring, ever so subtly, in the mundane precincts of another: he's dishing out a meal, she's receiving it, and he glimpses "her lithe leg," obviously "trained by . . . danger on peaks." This sort of thing happens all the time, of course, but how often is it this well captured? In these poems of his sixties and early seventies, Snyder often works such magic, in poems as compact as those of the Japanese masters he has long studied and in prose-and-verse pieces as crystalline as those in the famous travel books of Basho. From the opening prose-and-verse section on several climbs of Mount St. Helens, through short poems of observation and longer ones on daily life, to more prose-and-verse pieces on journeys near and far, Snyder seems more accepting than ever before. His 1960s eco-Marxist scolding is gone, and he's the wiser for it. Ray Olson
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