Myths + Texts

Gary Snyder’s second collection, Myths & Texts, was originally published in 1960 by Totem Press in association with Corinth Books. It has been reissued by New Directions in a completely revised format, with a new introduction by the author.

The three sequences in the books––“Logging,” “Hunting,” “Burning”––show the remarkable cohesiveness in Snyder’s writings over the years, for we find the poet absorbed, then as now, with Buddhist and Amerindian lore and other interconnections East and West, but above all with the primeval devotion to the land and work. “I set this poem loose on the world some years ago,” Snyder writes. “It looks like an old friend I haven’t seen in a while… The effort of this kind of poetry remains one of our most challenging enterprises: here on Occupied Turtle Island, we are most of us a still restless population of non-natives who don’t even know the plants or where our water comes from. Myself, raised in the West, in the basin of Puget Sound, what some poets now call Ish Nation, set out like everyone else, to make sense, and to find somehow a way to actually ’belong to the land.’”

• Softcover
• 54 pages
• 5.2 x 0.2 x 8 inches