A Place for Wayfaring: The Poetry and Prose of Gary Snyder (review)

Patrick Murphy’s goal in A Place for Wayfaring is “to update [his] overview” in Understanding Gary Snyder (oddly not listed in the bibliography) to cover Snyder’s publications since 1992 (vii). In this new work, Murphy plods through each volume of Snyder’s poetry and prose in a table-of-contents order, with a paragraph or two on each piece. The format is peculiarly reductive, giving the book a numbing “and then . . . and then” quality. This structure renders the analysis equally predictable. So rarely are Snyder’s words entered in evidence for Murphy’s critical argument that Snyder is worth attention that a cranky reader begins to question the legitimacy of the explication. What is in the poems is often unclear; the assessment of “Ami 24.XII.62” from The Back Country, for example, includes biographical detail not present on the page (77)—but that’s unclear until one returns to the poem. One might also question the assessment of that poem as unsuccessful “because the poet does not seem to be fully conscious of his own emotional reactions to the ostensible topic” (77).

Little connects the threads of Snyder’s developing deployment of themes, although repeated mention of some predominant ones (bioregionalism, Buddhism) sometimes leads to the exclusion of other equally evident readings. And could Snyder really be so didactic as Murphy implies, in explicating “By Frazier Creek Falls,” that he “attempts to immerse readers in the image of nature he portrays so that they will not learn from the poem itself but will imitate it by gaining direct experience” (112)?

The first chapter covers biography—the poet’s early life in the Pacific Northwest, education at Reed College, work as a logger and seaman, travel to Japan, Buddhist practice—and identifies some of the major influences. Each of ten subsequent chapters covers one or more of Snyder’s books in order of “initial composition rather than its date of book publication,” a logical ordering that provides for better understanding “of where [each] fits in Snyder’s evolving sensibilities and poetics” (63). Each chapter usefully establishes the context of composition: where Snyder lived, to whom he was married, how he earned a living.

Murphy is best when he finally does approach issues of development. His analysis of revisions of “The Politics of Ethnopoetics” (published in 1977; revised for A Place in Space) offers a taste of the changes in Snyder’s thinking (170). That Murphy’s analysis improves when he turns to Snyder’s environmental prose, especially The Practice of the Wild and A Place in Space, is to be expected, since Murphy is arguably most influential as an ecocritical writer and editor. (He hints at this in discussing “Unnatural Writing,” where Snyder “notes the denigration of [nature writing] by the literary establishment—a situation that is only now being challenged and altered” [171].) Unfortunately, even the treatment of Snyder’s prose suffers from its lack of reference to primary texts. The reader must struggle to discern where Murphy’s summary of Snyder’s argument leaves off and where critical analysis begins.