This Present Moment

April 6, 2015
Snyder (Nobody Home), a Zen Buddhist and 1975 Pulitzer Prize winner who has been writing poetry and prose for over 50 years, continues to address themes present in much of his work. He focuses on his travels, the wonders of history, and the environment, all with heavy emphasis on the metaphysical. Snyder lives by the conviction that the "blue sky duomo" is "all the church weâll ever need," and his poems are jocular, yet poignant; in a forest he sees "someone napping with his chainsaw/ after lunch," and while watching squirrels he equates their "wildly horny ferociously aloof" chase to that of Artemis and Pan. In addition to his tributes to nature, he touches upon an ever-surprising variety of subjects: the Eiffel Tower, Michelangeloâs "David," Abraham Lincoln, his computer, and polyandry. Of all the poems here, "Go Now," a retelling of his belovedâs death, is most likely to evoke a spiritual experience. As Snyder describes her cremation, a harrowing yet beautiful experience, he recalls the fumes as he watched her body disappear, as well as the feeling of eternal love: "This is the price of attachment," he writes, "worth even the smell." Snyder has parceled out the decade since his last poetry collection (Danger on Peaks) into textured poems of a rare and welcome candor.

March 15, 2015
The name of Snyder's book-length, composite poem, Mountains and Rivers without End (1996), also names the existential effect of his poetry. We read it to encounter again where we are: amid the enduring, slow violence of re-creationthe mountains adding earth from the planet's coreand resolutionthe rivers eroding the surface. Through Snyder's poetry, we occupy a present moment that, in a paradox that is inalienably human, lives on / to become / long ago. It is a private, though not hidden, moment, so that a poem whose title prepares us for polemic, Fixing the System, turns out to be about a leaky gate-valve in the encompassing context of sea, road, and the topless, bottomless, / empty blue sky. In fact, each of the moments of these poems is completely open, even when, as in the long, particular poem about the death of Snyder's late-life love, Go Now, it resounds with deep personal emotion. The moment of a Snyder poem is the Eternal Now of mindfulness and awareness, a good place to be.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)