Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #211653 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 184 pages

Synopsis
When this landmark work was first published, Gary Snyder was honored with the Bollingen Poetry Prize, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Orion Societys John Hay Award. Publishers Weekly named Mountains and Rivers Without End one of the best books of 1996. On April 8, 1956, Gary Snyder began work on a long poem entitled Mountains and Rives Without End. Initially inspired by East Asian landscape painting and his own experience within a chaotic universe where everything is in place, Snyders vision was further stimulated by Asian art and drama, Gaia history, Native American performance and storytelling, the practice of Zen Buddhism, and the varied landscapes of Japan, California, Alaska, Australia, China, and Taiwan.While a few individual sections of the poem have been published in literary magazines and a small bound collection, Snyders ardent fans have waited patiently through the past forty years for the completion of Mountains and Rivers Without End. The entire work appears for the first time in this volume.Traveling beyond its origins in the Western tradition of Whitman, Pound, and Williams, Mountains and Rivers is an epic of geology, prehistory, and planetary mythologies.

It is a poem about land and its processes, a book about wisdom, compassion, and myth, and a narrative work that is not quite like anything else. It will stand as a masterpiece of the long poem in American English.

Customer Reviews

Words of a Living Master

It's not often one gets the chance to hold in hand the words of a living master.

At a Library of Congress reading on October 24, 1996, Gary Snyder sounded out the Buddha-nature of his work by reading from "Mountains and Rivers Without End." I was familiar with him as one of the Dharma bums of the fifties, and later -- in the late seventies and early eighties -- as a "deep ecologist." I had read some of his poems and essays, and thought I had "got it." But I hadn't, really. Not until I heard him read.

That night I bought "Mountains and Rivers Without End" mainly because of the perennial philosophy Snyder paints in "The Blue Sky." In truth, I also felt a sense of longing: longing for the names of old friends he calls upon, names that I (as a Buddhist) miss hearing in my busy monkey-life (Shakyamuni Buddha, Kama, Ramana Maharshi); longing for the sounds of Pali words in Sanskrit chants; longing for the promise of the Blue Land, the Pure Land, the Land of Healing.

I realized later that I bought "Mountains and Rivers Without End" to try and take home some of the intense emotional involvement that the reading invoked. But this work, years in the making, can be appreciated on levels from the purely cerebral to the blatantly emotional. So even though the immediacy of hearing the words has faded, I continue to peel the verses like onions, discovering layers upon layers of truthful artistry that impart new immediacies with every reading.

Dan Everman