Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
As a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, bioregional activist, Zen Buddhist, and reluctant counterculture guru, Gary Snyder has been a major artistic force in America for over five decades, extending far beyond the Beat poems that first brought his work into the public eye.
Danger on Peaks begins with poems about Snyders first ascent of Mount St. Helens in 1945 and his learning that atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the morning of his descent. Containing work in a surprising variety of styles, creating an arc-shaped trail from these earliest climbs to what the poet calls poems of intimate, immediate life, gossip and insight,” Danger on Peaks is Snyders most personal work ever.
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.