For the full course of his remarkable career, Gary Snyder has continued his study of Eastern culture and philosophies. From the Ainu to the Mongols, from Hokkaido to Kyoto, from the landscapes of China to the backcountry of contemporary Japan, from the temples of Daitokoji to the Yellow River Valley, it is now clear how this work has influenced his poetry, his stance as an environmental and political activist, and his long practice of Zen. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Asia became a vocation for Snyder. While most American writers looked to the capitals of Europe for their inspiration, Sndyer looked East. American letters is profoundly indebted to this geographical choice.
Long rumored to exist, The Great Clod collects more than a dozen chapters, several published in The Coevolution Quarterly almost forty years ago when Snyder briefly described this work as "The China Book," and several others, the majority, never before published in any form. "Summer in Hokkaido," "Wild in China," "Ink and Charcoal, " "Stories to Save the World," "Walking the Great Ridge," these essays turn from being memoirs of travel to prolonged considerations of art, culture, natural history and religion. Filled with Snyder's remarkable insights and briskly beautiful descriptions, this collection adds enormously to the major corpus of his work, certain to delight and instruct his readers now and forever.
Praise for The Great Clod
"His newest book of prose, The Great Clod, is a series of essays on Asia's ecological history, combining culture and politics in a way that is, unsurprisingly, poetic and graceful. The Great Clod may be slim but its scope is immense."-The Japan Times
"Classical poetry, calligraphy, the best source of temple incense-all figure in the text, which has something of the feel of a valediction. Elegant and thoughtful, with much to read between the lines in commentary on a long life's work. Students and admirers of Snyder will be enchanted and intrigued." -Kirkus Reviews
"Each essay furnishes a graceful, very conversational (sentence fragments and all), but keenly well-informed enticement to pursue its subject further. This kind of friendly, even compassionate, mode of instruction comes, of course, from the American arguably most responsible for spreading appreciation of East Asia among North Americans." -Booklist
Praise for Gary Snyder
"Snyder's is a wise voice crying out on behalf of the wilderness with an authority and eloquence that's not been heard in our literature since Thoreau." -San Francisco Chronicle
"His sense of the history of land and cultures and his ability to write as both the Worker and the Thinker create a fertile whole." -Los Angeles Times
"No one has written so forcefully against urban sprawl, pollution, and mechanization. Somehow Snyder has managed to stay outside what used to be called the System and to remain a free man." -New York Times Book Review
"Snyder is an elder statesman of the natural world and the tribal unions of poetry. He has a body of work as original as predecessors Williams Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens." -The Bloomsbury Review
"His greatest strength-a quiet and profound elegance, an ability to write a simple phrase that seems to have been echoing through human consciousness for three or four thousand years." -Lewis MacAdams, California Magazine
"Gary Snyder has maintained a bedrock sanity and art for the benefit of all our mutual lives, generously, specifically, constantly. If poetry means anything, and it does, his has made that point for all of us again and again and again." -Robert Creeley, author of Memory Gardens
"This poet's great gift has always been perfect visual clarity...and, needless to say, derives from Snyder's vision in the larger sense." -Paul Berman,Village Voice
"What thoughtful beauty! How skillfully Gary Snyder interfuses the practical knowledge of an animal sense with story, language, and song. True teachers in American are now an endangered species. I learn so much from this good man's perception, humor, discipline, and love for this world." -James Hillman
