Synopses & Reviews
In his first collection of new poems since Axe Handles (1983), Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder shares 55 new poems and prose poems. As long-time readers will recognize, this collection is unique in Snyder's oeuvre, finding the poet experimenting with a wide variety of styles, including an extended foray into the Japanese form haibun, "making it an American form," as Snyder himself remarks. Some of the poet's most personal work is contained in two sections of poems exploring "intimate immediate life, gossip and insight." Danger on Peaks begins with the poet's first climb of Mount St. Helens on August 13, 1945, and his learning on the morning after his descent about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. The poet visits Mount St. Helens again in 2000 to view the blast site of the 1980 eruption. Then follow poems for the Buddhas of Bamiyan Valley and the World Trade towers. More than a mere gathering of unrelated poems, Danger on Peaks is a constructed work, where every part contributes to the whole.
Review
"The best of this new work explores the interplay between what's remembered, what's seen now and what may come." David Kirby, The New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
In his first collection of new poems since Axe Handles (1983), Gary Snyder includes fifty-five new poems and prose poems. As longtime readers will recognize, this collection is unique in Snyder's oeuvre, finding the poet experimenting with a wide variety of styles, including an extended foray in the Japanese form haibun, "making it an American form," as the poet remarks. Two sections of poems exploring "intimate immediate life, gossip and insight" are some of the poet's most personal work.
Danger on Peaks begins with the poet's first climb of Mount St. Helens on August 13, 1945, and his learning on the morning after his descent about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Again the poet visits Mount St. Helens in 2000 to view the blast site of the 1980 eruption. Then follow poems for the Buddhas of Bamiyan Valley and the World Trade Towers. More than a mere gathering of unrelated poems, Danger on Peaks is a constructed work, where every part contributes to the whole.
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
More than a mere gathering of unrelated poems, Danger on Peaks features the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's most personal work, where every part contributes to the whole.