GARY SNYDER: GREENING AGAIN

Danger on Peaks. By Gary Snyder. Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker Hoard, 2004. Pp. 112. $22.

In one of the more meditative poems of his new collection, "Waiting for a Ride," Gary Snyder says "most of my work, / such as it is is done." If this is true, Danger on Peaks nevertheless proves that he is continuing to produce work that extends his range and confirms his standing as one of our most original, provocative, and talented poets. The collection has a personal and retrospective cast, with its frequent musings on past relationships and the turns that the lives of family members have taken. A poem describing lunch with an old friend and former brother-in-law, "One Day in Late Summer," is typical of the way the past has come to suffuse the present for Snyder, with its reminiscences of the bookstore that stood where the restaurant does now and of hanging out in the fifties. Yet if Snyder seems increasingly reflective about his personal history and the passing of time, he also introduces a new kind of concern with manifestations of human violence, without losing the capacity for humor and affirmation that characterizes his work.

A return to Mount Saint Helens in 2000 with a vulcanologist friend seems to have had a catalytic effect on Snyder, releasing boyhood memories and stimulating him to write the book's strong opening sequence tracing the evolution of his experience of the mountain. Two prose pieces take us back to the beginnings of Snyder's lifelong fascination with mountains, the first describing a camping trip to Spirit Lake at age thirteen ("smoky crusty tincan meals all cooked by boys") and the second his first ascent two years later, evoking the emotional and spiritual highs he experienced on entering the other world of the big snow peaks. His idealistic petition to the mountain ("Please help this life") anticipates his reaction upon descending to find newspaper reports of Hiroshima with pictures of the devastation, a vow to fight this destructive force "by the purity and beauty and permanence of Mt. St. Helens." Snyder's reconstruction of his boyhood sensibility offers intriguing glimpses of attitudes that would emerge in his work, including delight in his ease and agility on rocky slopes (Snyder as mountain sheep) and an attraction to the vision and spiritual discipline to be found in the mountains (Snyder as Yamabushi). We see this early experience through the eyes of the mature poet, who can describe the snow peaks that Mount Saint Helens epitomizes as resting "in the zone of five-colored banners and writhing crackling dragons in veils of ragged mist and frost-crystals." The interplay of younger and older sensibilities recalls John Muir's rewriting and expansion of his early journals in his seventies to produce My First Summer in the Sierra, though with a very different kind of spirituality.

Snyder shows his boyhood image of the mountain's perfection dissolving in "1980: Letting Go," in which he evokes the drama and the explosive force of the eruption of that year, "five hundred Hiroshima bombs." The dust jacket of the book juxtaposes a photograph of the perfect cone of Mount Saint Helens viewed from Spirit Lake, taken by Snyder when he was fifteen, with a contemporary photograph showing the mountain's cone blown open. The pieces in which Snyder describes his eventual return to "Loowit," the native name he likes to use for Mount Saint Helens, mingle recollections ("I worked around this lake in '49, both green then") with views of flattened trees and returning vegetation, working their way through controversies about restoration to a longer view characteristic of his later work. The fine poem "Pearly Everlasting," taking its name from the bushy white flowers Snyder finds growing up around decaying logs, responds to an imperative of Dogen that he quotes ( "Do not be tricked by human-centered views") by introducing a timescale in which decay takes place over thousands of summers and wryly suggests that the help he asked from the mountain long before arrived in an unexpected way. He dislocates our conventional view of the destructiveness of the eruption, with its "Blast Zone," by comparing the downed trees to exhausted revelers after the "big party" from which Siddhartha slipped away for good. The effect of Snyder's subversive moves is to suggest ways of understanding and accepting natural processes even when they may surprise or baffle us. In the final poem of the sequence, "Enjoy the Day," we see him in the role of canny elder that he has perfected, embracing the changed reality of the scene and attributing to his "old advisors" the view that he has arrived at himself: "New friends and dear sweet old tree ghosts / here we are again. Enjoy the day."

If Snyder has learned to accept the natural world's surprises and to adjust to its timescales, he reacts more critically to human destructiveness and the hubris this implies. Poems in the final section of the book ("After Bamiyan") evoking the destruction of the World Trade Center and of the huge stone Buddhas at Bamiyan echo Snyder's youthful reaction to Hiroshima and focus more sharply than anything in his previous work on human suffering and the need for compassion. He invokes Jeffers in describing the spreading "blast" of human influence on the earth but avoids Jeffers's pessimism and alienation from humanity. While Snyder will not allow a friend to excuse the Taliban's destruction of the Afghan Buddhas by appealing to the Buddhist belief in impermanence, he turns to Buddhism for healing words and images to set against images of violence, in an envoi that invokes the "great wisdom of the path that goes beyond" and, most effectively, in a poem describing a visit to the temple of Senso-ji in Tokyo with its swirl of pilgrims seeking out the Kannon of Asakusa, its bodhisattva offering peace and compassion. Snyder presents himself as "walking the pilgrim path" and seeking guidance for "all beings . . . inside or outside of time." A book remarkable for its scenes of natural and human destructiveness ends with hope for transcending loss and fear anchored in a scene that focuses on ritual worship of the Buddhist goddess of mercy.

Snyder includes the noisy, crowded street of shops leading up to the Buddha Hall and the traffic of the city beyond, embracing mundane human activity along with moments of transcendence in a fashion characteristic of many of the poems in this book, one section of which is titled "Daily Life." Immersion in the work and play of ordinary life is something we have come to expect from Snyder's poetry. In Danger on Peaks as in Mountains and Rivers Without End, this can take the form of journeys, with Snyder often mapping his experience by tracing the highways he travels. In his new book he experiments with haibun, mingling prose with short poems that, while not the haiku traditionally associated with the form, often have an economy and suggestiveness that recall haiku. He begins "Night Herons" with a short prose account of discovering roosting night herons in a grove of live oaks at Putah Creek, then shifts into verse:

The form is well suited to Snyder's habit of juxtaposing scenes from natural and urban worlds, the latter often represented by the freeway roar that suggests the buzz and rush of modern life. In "Spilling the Wind" he opposes this roar to "hundreds of white-fronted geese / from nowhere / [that] spill the wind from their wings / wobbling and sideslipping down." Such oppositions reflect a habit of resisting simple dualisms by embracing different viewpoints and the possibility of living in different worlds and reflect a Buddhist sensibility that has become more pronounced in Snyder's later work. At the same time they function as a critique of "human-centered views" by making us aware of the priority and the enduring reality of the natural world. The poem "Really the Real" ends with Snyder driving back to Davis and shivering as he recalls a scene that he encountered after a day of driving freeways and back roads in the vicinity of the Cosumnes River: thousands of sandhill cranes landing in flooded farmland a few miles from the I-5: "in the wetlands, in the ongoing elder what you might call, / really the real, world."

In Danger on Peaks Snyder often perceives this elder world in mountain landscapes. The stony mountains that he can see from where he climbs a gully by the San Juan River become "old advisors" who counter "despair at how the human world goes down" by offering another perspective ("Steady, They Say"). He has a way of introducing new perspectives by shifting timescales, imagining himself sleeping on the rocky hill of the Acropolis before the buildings were there, or seeing "ghosts of pleistocene icefields" stretching away on both sides of the path he walks on Sand Ridge. Snyder's sense of the present is often informed by an awareness of the layered human past of the places he describes, but he complicates this by reminding us of the presence of the nonhuman. He concludes "Mariano Vallejo's Library," a poem that plays on the ironies of colonial history, with a warning about the datura that still grows there: "whoever's here, whatever language—/ race, or century, be aware / that plant can scour your mind."

Those who have followed Snyder's writing will recognize familiar preoccupations and poetic habits in his new collection, but they will also be struck by its reach. Snyder continues to experiment: with the mixed prose and poetry of the haibun; with short poems, some slight but others wonderfully witty or resonant; with efforts to recast his early experience. He risks writing about intimately personal matters (his wife's illness, his sister's death, his own aging). And he introduces a new note signaled by his title, a phrase that he introduces in a poem about first seeing his wife, Carole Koda, serving in the zendo: "Her lithe leg. . . . trained / by the heights by the / danger on peaks." Here the word pays homage to his wife's skill as a climber in dangerous places and perhaps alludes to other kinds of danger as well. Snyder's account of his first ascent of Mount Saint Helens suggests danger, mingled with exhilaration, in the isolation from the world below that comes from entering "the realm of clouds and cranes" and looking down to find "there was nothing there." His poem describing the eruption, and the helplessness of those caught too near the summit to survive, dramatizes a more immediate threat, from an unpredictable and irresistible natural force. Snyder renders the human cost of terrorist violence in a powerful short poem in the final section of the book, "Falling from a Height, Holding Hands," height here becoming that of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, emblems of human aspiration of a quite different sort from that embodied by climbers: "We will be / two peregrines diving / all the way down." Snyder's renderings of violence, including that of Hiroshima, dramatize human vulnerability and at the same time arouse empathy for its victims, evoking compassion as well as horror. Some of its manifestations also suggest a human arrogance that threatens both culture and the natural environment.

Snyder suggests the resilience of the natural world through images of regeneration, such as the new growth on the slopes of Mount Saint Helens and that anticipated by the conclusion of "Loose on Earth," an apocalyptic fantasy in which we see the rubble produced by the human "explosion on the planet," after millennia, "soften, fragment, / sprout, and green again." He suggests a way forward for human culture through the calm and the groundedness of the Buddhist way he evokes in "The Kannon of Asakusa" and "Envoy" and also by the saving humor of a poem such as "In the Santa Clarita Valley," in which his habit of showing the mingling of natural and human worlds takes a surprising turn as he imagines tall highway signs as skinny wildflowers, McDonald's and "eight-petaled yellow" Shell, "growing in the asphalt riparian zone / by the soft roar of the flow / of Interstate 5." Among other things, Danger on Peaks reminds us that Snyder commands a remarkable range of tones.