An Evening With Gary Snyder

Iconic Beat Generation poet Gary Snyder’s first book, Riprap, published in 1959, has become a classic in American poetry, and he’s gone on to publish more than a dozen collections of poetry and prose. Practice of the Wild is one of the most influential books about the environment of the last fifty years. His recently completed long poem, “Mountains and Rivers Without End,” is broadly recognized as one of the greatest long poems in American literature, and his last book of poems, Danger on Peaks, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award. In his latest collection of poetry, This Present Moment (Counterpoint), Snyder finds himself ranging over the planet. Snyder lays out these poems as a map of the last decade. Placed side-by-side, they become a path and a trail of complexity and lyrical regard, a sort of riprap of the poet’s eighth decade. And in the mix are some of the most beautiful domestic poems of his great career, poems about his work as a homesteader and householder, as a father and husband, as a friend and neighbor.