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The last of the Beat poets

What do you do with a poet who has outlived his movement? Kerouac, Cassady and Spicer drank themselves to death; Ginsberg and Burroughs made the rickety leap to poet-celebrity. The San Francisco born poet Gary Snyder has survived in part by lingering in the calmer peripheries of the chaotic Beat Generation. He may have been immortalised in Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, but he has always seemed separate from that break-neck, self-destructive style of living and writing. One of his most famous poems, 1969’s ‘Riprap’, has none of their frenetic urban energy. It begins, “Lay down these words / Before your mind like rocks.”

Snyder’s latest collection, This Present Moment, carries on that stillness. In a poem entitled ‘Wildfire News’, he writes “I have to slow down my mind / Slow down my mind.” 

Snyder’s poetry has an air of calm accumulation; adjectives, places, elements of the natural world are layered in his thin stanzas. For Snyder, observing and accumulating aspects of the world around him is a way into knowing and understanding them, feeling his way around them in his open, conversational tone. In ‘How to Know Birds’, Snyder compiles deft little lists of identifi- able features, “Size, speed, sorts of flight / Quirks. Tail flicks, wing-shakes, bobbing.” Elsewhere in this collection, terms and tribal names act as a guiding thread, a line to follow “from one end of Kerala to the other”, as he writes in ‘Polyandry’.

The emphasis on the immediate and the ephemeral, the ‘present moment’ of the title, is visible in the slight, fragmentary stanzas of ‘Seven Brief Poems from Italia’. As with much of Snyder’s poetry, these bear the influence of Japan’s haiku form, filtered through the Imagists of the twentieth century. His poems thrive in the pared-back clarity of these images, the brittle rhythms of ‘Gnarly’ and the unobtrusive peaceful moments locked into his scenes of nature.

This Present Moment extends its reach beyond Snyder’s Sierra Nevada home to take in Kyoto, Paris, the Kalahari Desert and the shrine at Delphi. A glance at Snyder’s acknowledgements is enough to gain a sense of his global presence, yet his poetry remains rooted in the intimacy of human connections. A poem entitled, ‘The Earth’s Wild Places’, begins, “Your eyes, your mouth and hands, / the public highways.”

As Snyder reaches the latter part of his life – he turned 85 in May of this year – it was inevitable that he would come to dwell on memory and mortality. ‘Go Now’, the final poem in the collection, details the strange suddenness of even a long-expected death. “She watched the small nesting birds / in the tree just outside. / Then she died.” This Present Moment may be one of Snyder’s final collections. If so, he has left us on a characteristically subtle, skilful and luminous note.

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