Published today by Counterpoint Press on the occasion of his eighty-sixth birthday, Gary Snyder‘s new book, The Great Clod – Notes and Memoirs on Nature and History in East Asia.
As the publishers have observed:
“Long rumored to exist, The Great Clod collects eight essays, several published in The Coevolution Quarterly almost forty years ago when Snyder briefly described this work as “the China Book”, and several others, the majority never published in any form. “Summer in Hokkaido”, “Wild in China’, “Ink and Charcoal”, “Stories to Save the World”, “Walking the Great Ridge”, these essays turn from being memoirs of travel to prolonged considerations of art, culture, natural history and religion. Filled with Snyder’s remarkable insights and briskly beautiful descriptions, this collection adds enormously to the major corpus of his work, certain to delight and instruct his readers now and forever.”
Kirkus Review notes:
“Snyder..was an environmentalist before that word was widely applied, “radicalized”, he memorably writes, “by the ghosts of the original trees still hanging out by their stumps and telling me what had gone on” in the overlogged forests of the Puget Sound. He has also been a student of Asian religions for seven decades. Both interests inform this slender volume, which reads as a kind of personalized digest of scholarship and history, blended with memoir and travelogue – a book, in short, not quite like any other but trademark Snyder, its learning lightly worn but profoundly stated……Elegant and thoughtful, with mch to read between the lines in commentary on a long life’s work. Students and admirers of Snyder will be enchanted and intrigued.”
Snyder will be reading from the book on Tuesday May 24 at Books Inc, in Berkeley.
Previous Gary Snyder birthday postings may be accessed here, here and here
The Allen Ginsberg Project wishes Gary a very happy birthday!
Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday!