Back on the Fire.

Snyder, Gary (author).

Poet, Buddhist, man of the land, and scholar, Snyder uses breath as his lines’ measure in poetry and prose as he celebrates nature’s beauty and considers humankind’s impact on the good earth. Following his most recent poetry collection, Danger on Peaks (2004), Snyder now presents remarkably personal and powerful essays. Noting that “the whole world is in the trust of humans now,” Snyder looks to fire as an element that can teach us about destruction and regeneration. As he writes of his beloved Sierra Nevada home ground as “a fire-adapted ecosystem,” Snyder asserts the importance of being “nature literate,” and of recognizing that all living entities have a right to life. We are the “problem species,” Snyder avers, yet we are capable of astonishing acts of creation. Writing in praise of cave art and haiku, he defines the role artists play in the “active defense of nature.” Remembering lost loved ones—his wife and poets Allen Ginsberg and Philip Whelan—Snyder, sage and incisive, gazes into the flames and ponders “the challenge of living wisely for the long run.”