The "Back Country" in section 1 (Far West) of this fourth book of
poetry is reminiscent of a Hemingway landscape of fishing camps,
outdoor men, mountains, and physical exhilaration. But it is not
nostalgia-haunted. Gary Snyder is a new kind of expatriate, and one
whose ideas and poetry have, understandably, an enormous appeal for
his contemporary world. He has travelled widely in Japan and India,
studied Zen and other Far Eastern religions and cultures. Like many
of today's travelling youth, he is "expatriate" not from his own
country, but from industrial-suburban civilization, and even from
protest. Whether he writes of American-Indian myths, logging camps,
and love affairs, or of scenes, people and religions of Japan and
India, his poetry has an astonishing physical reality, an awareness
of all senses including the frankly sexual and the mystical. A
reaffirmation of a back country of the spirit too rarely seen among
poets and/or residents of various other exurbs. (Kirkus Reviews)
This collection is made up of four sections: "Far West"--poems of
the Western mountain country where, as a young man. Gary Snyder
worked as a logger and forest ranger; "Far East"--poems written
between 1956 and 1964 in Japan where he studied Zen at the
monastery in Kyoto; "Kali"--poems inspired by a visit to India and
his reading of Indian religious texts, particularly those of
Shivaism and Tibetan Buddhism; and "Back"--poems done on his return
to this country in 1964 which look again at our West with the eyes
of India and Japan. The book concludes with a group of translations
of the Japanese poet Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933), with whose work
Snyder feels a close affinity. The title, The Back Country, has
three major associations; wilderness. the "backward" countries, and
the "back country" of the mind with its levels of being in the
unconscious.
General
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