Begun in
Berkeley on April 8, 1956, Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers without End is an epic of geology, prehistory, and mythology. The poems travel beyond Western traditions to encompass Asian art and drama, Native American performance and storytelling, and Snyder’s own practice of Zen Buddhism.

—the wideness, the

foolish loving spaces

full of heart.

Walking on walking,

      under foot     earth turns

Streams and mountains never stay the same.

 First published in 1996—
Gary worked on this for forty years—this landmark work  celebrates the disparate elements of the earth—sky, rock, water—while exploring the human connection to nature with a subtle wisdom that bears repeated, often revelatory, readings. Winner of the Bollingen Poetry Prize, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Orion Society’s John Hay Award, among others, Gary Snyder finds his quiet brilliance celebrated in this new edition of one of his most treasured works.

Out there somewhere

a shrine for the old ones,

the dust of the old bones,

       old songs and tales.

What we ate—who ate what—

         how we all prevailed.

 Essentially, this is a unique book-length poem about land and its processes, a book about wisdom, compassion, and myth, and a narrative work that is not quite like anything else.

Also by Gary Snyder: The Practice of the Wild and Back on the Fire.