Danger on Peaks - Hardcover

Snyder, Gary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1593760418 ISBN 13: 9781593760410

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2004

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Gary Snyder is the author of sixteen 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 and a finalist for the National Book Award in 1992, he has been awarded the Bollingen Poetry Prize and the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1593760418
• ISBN 13: 9781593760410
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128