One if by land.(Verse chronicle)(Danger on Peaks)(Book Review)

Gary Snyder was a marquee poet in the Sixties, when his eco-Buddhist paeans were read in every commune from Maine to Baja. Decades later, their misty imagism, indebted equally to Ezra Pound and Japanese haiku, seems cloying and sentimental, dependent on the Zeitgeist for its effect. The poetry of the day is passe when the day is past, its beauties no longer beautiful; and even a style stronger than Snyder's may sooner or later seem obsolete, like the picket fences of Augustan couplets when the hurricane of romanticism swept through.

The poems of Danger on Peaks, Snyder's first volume of new verse in twenty years, are a throwback to those heady days of Haight-Ashbury, free love, and Volkswagen buses, though what used to be poems are now mostly half-hearted diary jottings followed by a snippet of verse. (1) Snyder has been influenced by the travel journals of Basho (the style of poetry mixed with prose is called haibun), but if prose is to have the force of poetry it can't be as badly written as poetry.

In 1945, Snyder climbed Mount St. Helens and on coming down learned that the United States had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The awful contrast--the tranquil splendor of the mountain, the hideous deaths of innocent civilians--brutally affected him:

 
   Horrified, blaming scientists and politicians 
   and the governments of the world, I swore a 
   vow to myself, something like, "By the purity 
   and beauty and permanence of Mt. St. 
   Helens, I will fight against this cruel destructive 
   power and those who would seek to use 
   it, for all my life." 

It's easy to forgive the pretensions and naivete of the young man, harder to bear the self-satisfied maunderings of the older one. Thirty-five years later, the mountain erupted with far more violence than a mere A-bomb--and, reader, guess what! The explosion reminded him of Hiroshima! The romantic sublime ended not with a whimper but a bang. As Snyder says elsewhere, in an argot that promises the Sixties never died, "West Coast snowpeaks are too much!"

Snyder has long been a guru for the ecology movement, his poems reflecting the woodsy self-reliance, the search for knowledge, that forms an appealing part of his character. He studs his poems with a geologist's lingua franca--doab, schrund, tephra, lahar, cirque--and has a cheerful disregard for the small formalities of English. Fortunately most of his wilder notions were corrected, between the proofs and the finished book, by some cigar-chewing copyeditor of the old school, one who still cares for the distinctions between "lay" and "lie" and has no love for idiosyncrasies like "fistfull" and "millenia" (though he missed the animal whose neck had been "ate out"). Oh, man! you can hear Snyder say, don't be so uptight! None of this would matter, if the poems weren't like the disconnected thoughts of a man trying to make verse with magnets on a refrigerator door:

 
   white-hot crumbling boulders lift and fly in a 
   burning sky-river wind of 
   searing lava droplet hail, 
   huge icebergs in the storm, exploding mud, 
   shoots out flat and rolls a swelling billowing 
   cloud of rock bits, 
   crystals, pumice, shards of glass 
   dead ahead blasting away--a 
   heavenly host of tall trees goes flat down 
   lightning dances through the giant smoke