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Reviews M ountains and Rivers without End. By Gary Snyder. (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1996. 166 pages, $20.00.) “Swift the years beyond recall,” the poet T ’ao Chien said more than fifteen hundred years ago. It’s hard to believe that after forty years, Snyder’s long poem has been completed— and hard to believe it has really been forty years. Fortunately the work is not a disappointment: some of the new poems are among Snyder’s best. For all its diversity of subject, the work is not one of those garru­ lous long poems so common in American literature. One mark o f Snyder’s style is concision, rapid movement from image to image without filler, with subtle connections between images. For all its concreteness, the poem is still a “personal epic,” one of the com­ mon forms of the American long poem. But as a Buddhist, Snyder knows that the self is empty and ego must be transcended, which seems to have spared him windy self-expression. Personal and impersonal: Zen has no problem with such paradoxes, teaching that emptiness is form and form is emptiness. Snyder’s jour­ neys, especially through western America, are the subject. He said long ago that the poem was based on No drama, probably indicating that a pattern of return to sacred places and to sites of crucial experiences would be part of his method: No dramas often take characters to important “spots of tim e.” Som e of the journeys are through the unconscious or the realms of gold glimpsed through works of art: these are part of the world also. One of the interesting critical questions about Snyder that needs addressing is the problem of representation: his work is focused on the concrete, but Zen gives him an awareness of the world as som e­ thing like a work of art. He begins the book with a striking quotation by the Zen master Dogen called “Painted Rice Cake,” in which the master says that “the entire phenomenal universe and the empty sky are nothing but a painting.” Further, “Since this is so, there is no remedy for satisfying hunger other than a painted rice cake.” Snyder’s work is remarkably vivid, but it is made o f words, not objects. Yet it satisfies important hungers. He is aware of such paradoxes. The book is carefully organized in four sections. The first shows us wan­ derings through the natural world (or worlds, as in “Three Worlds, Three 400 Western American Literature Realms, Six Roads”), and the second looks at the human world of markets and cities and the culture-bearing Humpbacked Flute Player. The third describes more peregrinations through the natural world, and the fourth embodies piety— no other word w ill do: Snyder looks with reverence at religious forces perceiv­ able in the natural world. Snyder likes etym ologies, so it is fitting to call him pious, as the word involves both kindliness and duty. Two keynotes of his work are compassion and responsibility in caring for the earth. The form is elegant and not forced, and of course themes overlap in the sec­ tions, creating a dialectic that w ill take years to trace. The publisher has pro­ duced an unusually elegant book, too, with Chiura Obata’s “Evening Glow at Yosemite Waterfall” on the dust jacket and reproductions of the Chinese paint­ ing o f the title for the frontispiece and endpapers. The apparatus at the end— an essay on the making of the work and some helpful notes for Snyder’s more eso­ teric sources— is not at all pretentious. The book, product of so many decades, deserves the painstaking production. Painstaking is an excellent word for this sequence. B e r t A lm o n U n iv e r s it y o f A l b e r ta Just P aSiL abor Day: Selected and New Poems, 1969-1995. By Kirk Robertson. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1996. 309 pages, $16.00.) In the foreword to Kirk Robertson’s latest collection, B ill Kittredge writes that the poems speak “in the common cadences of many lives of the West”; they are...

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