Six Sections from MOUNTAINS AND RIVERS WITHOUT END by Gary Snyder. Four Seasons Foundation, $1.50.
Two lines, I think, well illustrate the divided mind and art of Gary Snyder. The first I take from a poem published in 1965, “Through the Smoke Hole”: “There is another world above this one . . . the way to it is through the smoke of this one”; and the other from Snyder’s second volume, Myths and Texts (1960): “How rare to be born a human being!” From the beginning, Snyder has understood and written lyrically about the absolute and final beauty of the mundane real. The poems of his first collection, Riprap (1959), set the reader in the midst of western American and Japanese scenes or society—in logging camps, at the seaside or on the sea, in streets and houses. Very deeply imbedding and locating his poems in particular places or people, taking an equally sensuous and chaste delight in either, he is explicit and detailed insofar as he can recreate in himself and for us the wonder of first knowledge: the usual, in his lyrics, is seen as the unique, the common and human as the rare. Ultimately, his joy in the explicit is richly symbolic of the self which can experience and sustain such flashes of joy. He offers himself, objectively, as a servant-example for us. He teaches us what it means to clear away the smoke and come upon the world, incandescently.
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