The Back Country

By: Gary Snyder

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Paperback | 17 January 1971 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
160 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
20.5 x 13.2 x 1.0

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This collection is made up of four sections: "Far West"--poems of the Western mountain country where, as a young man. Gary Snyder worked as a logger and forest ranger; "Far East"--poems written between 1956 and 1964 in Japan where he studied Zen at the monastery in Kyoto; "Kali"--poems inspired by a visit to India and his reading of Indian religious texts, particularly those of Shivaism and Tibetan Buddhism; and "Back"--poems done on his return to this country in 1964 which look again at our West with the eyes of India and Japan. The book concludes with a group of translations of the Japanese poet Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933), with whose work Snyder feels a close affinity. The title, The Back Country, has three major associations; wilderness. the "backward" countries, and the "back country" of the mind with its levels of being in the unconscious.

Industry Reviews

The "Back Country" in section 1 (Far West) of this fourth book of poetry is reminiscent of a Hemingway landscape of fishing camps, outdoor men, mountains, and physical exhilaration. But it is not nostalgia-haunted. Gary Snyder is a new kind of expatriate, and one whose ideas and poetry have, understandably, an enormous appeal for his contemporary world. He has travelled widely in Japan and India, studied Zen and other Far Eastern religions and cultures. Like many of today's travelling youth, he is "expatriate" not from his own country, but from industrial-suburban civilization, and even from protest. Whether he writes of American-Indian myths, logging camps, and love affairs, or of scenes, people and religions of Japan and India, his poetry has an astonishing physical reality, an awareness of all senses including the frankly sexual and the mystical. A reaffirmation of a back country of the spirit too rarely seen among poets and/or residents of various other exurbs. (Kirkus Reviews)

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