Mountains and Rivers Without End [Paperback]

Gary Snyder (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1997

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A magnificent achievement, this epic poem belies the common take that Snyder's poetic career is notable mainly in the past tense and is refracted by the works of others. Without doubt, Snyder's exploration of nature, Zen Buddhism and his travels through unexplored corners of American society influenced the Beat writers of the 1950s and early 1960s, and some of his early works (Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, 1965, and Turtle Island, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975) are masterpieces. This new, vital work sums up stylistic and thematic concerns by uniting 39 poems written between 1956 and 1996 (many published here for the first time) into a seamless whole that, like a modern Leaves of Grass, combines fascination with the varied particulars of the way people live with awe at the majesty of nature. Each of four sections is organized around a familiar Snyder focus: the demands made on people by nature and time ("The road that's followed goes forever;/ in half a minute crossed and left behind"); observation of the terrain he occupies ("Slash of calligraphy of freeways of cars") and various American landscapes ("trucks on the freeways,/ Kenworth, Peterbilt, Mack,/ rumble diesel depths,/ like boulders bumping in an outwash glacial river"); and subtle tributes to those who have survived the last 40 years ("At the end of the ice age/ we are the bears, we are the ravens,/ We are the salmon/ in the gravel/ At the end of an ice age"). A concluding essay, "The Making of Mountain and Rivers Without End," serves as an intellectual mini-autobiography and a gloss on some of the Eastern influences on the poem. This is a major work by a venerable master of post-WWII American poetry.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

Afloat
Arctic Midnight Twilight Cool Horth Breeze With Low Clouds
The Bear Mother
The Black-tailed Hare
The Blue Sky
Boat Of A Billion Years
Bubbs Creek Haircut
The Canyon Wren
The Circumambulation Of Mt. Tamalpais
Covers The Ground
Cross-legg'd
The Dance
Earrings Dangling And Miles Of Desert
Earth Verse
The Elwha River
Endless Streams And Mountains
Finding The Space In The Heart
The Flowing
Haida Gwai North Coast, Haikoon Beach, Hiellen River Raven Croaks
The Hump Backed Flute Player
Instructions
Jackrabbit
Journeys
Ma
Macaques In The Sky
The Market
The Mountain Spirit
New Moon Tongue
Night Highway 99
Night Song Of The Los Angeles Basin
An Offering For Tara
Old Bones
Old Woodrat's Stinky House
Raven's Beak River At The End
Three Worlds, Three Realms, Six Roads
Under The Hills Near The Morava River
Walking The New York Bedrock Alive In The Sea Of Information
We Wash Our Bowls In This Water
With This Flesh
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Details

• Paperback: 184 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (September 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1887178570
• ISBN-13: 978-1887178570
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 4.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,454,360 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Words of a Living Master, June 6, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Mountains and Rivers Without End (Paperback)

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

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Words of a Living Master, June 6, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Mountains and Rivers Without End (Hardcover)

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

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A profound retrospective in which one man speaks for all, February 25, 2002

By 

Christopher Culver - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Mountains and Rivers Without End (Paperback)

Written over forty years, MOUNTAINS AND RIVERS WITHOUT END is poet Gary Snyder's highest achievment. Here he has presented a perception of the world that has taken four decades of experience to put into words. The collection moves chronologically from Snyder's glimpse in the 50's of a Japanese scroll that gave the book its name, though his wanderings in the American West, and into senescene.

Decades of travel have exposure Snyder to so much of our planet, and this experience forms a major part of MOUNTAINS AND RIVERS WITHOUT END. Mixing ecological perspective with Buddhist metaphysics, these poems are a powerful description of Man's relationship with the planet. Snyder is supremely aware of how attached mankind is to the Earth, and how its ever-surrounding landscape influences peoples.

The final poem "Finding the Space in the Heart" is a moving retrospective of Gary Snyder's forty years as a writer, from his Beat poet days in the 1950's to the older man that he is now, using elements of Buddhism's Prajnaparamita-sutra, the so called "Heart Sutra."

While Snyder's poems sometimes do not succeed due to clumsy meter, a lacking that makes me give this work only four stars, they often move the reader with their sincerity and signifance. MOUNTAINS AND RIVERS WITHOUT END is certainly worth a read.