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“Danger on Peaks” written by Gary Snyder Published by Shoemaker Hoard, September 2004 Review by Pamela Biery Gary Snyder’s Danger on Peaks is both a surprise and a pleasure: surprising since the Pulitzer Prize winning poet spent thirty years on his last work “Mountains and Rivers without End” which was published in 1996, leading many to suspect it might be awhile before another Snyder work would be available, and a pleasure because the unexpected is sometimes most satisfying. Released in September 2004, Danger on Peaks is a compilation of prose and poetry, derived largely from Snyder’s personal journals and notes. The book deals thematically with four events—the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens in 1980, the destruction of the great Buddha in Bamiyan near Kabul Afghanistan in March 2001 and the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. The bombing of Hiroshima and Mt. St. Helens are tied together in Snyder’s experience since he had just descended from a Saint Helens climb when he learned the bomb had been dropped. Nature wrecked a powerful blow to the pristine beauty of Saint Helens some forty years later…There is a disquieting undertone to our tenure here on earth. Snyder describes with Zen-like precision trends in nature and man that leave one with an uneasy feeling—destruction is part of our world. Not long ago having the opportunity to hear Snyder read from this work, I came to realize that the lines of my own life blend so thoroughly with his descriptions, I cannot separate the writing, the places and my direct experience. The places he describes from his years in the Pacific Northwest are my own childhood haunts and his prose drawn from California I know still more intimately. Deftly capturing time, place and the mood of a natural world appears a slight of hand for Snyder. In Danger on Peaks there is a strong undercurrent of Oriental feeling, partly expressed by the use of haibun, a lesser used form consisting of prose followed by a haiku or short, often ironic or contemplative poem. Snyder assumes the role of an impartial, and sometimes, curiously amused, observer of events described with sparse language. The collection of writings can be taken separately, or treated as a cycle. Either way, these reflections are both deeply subjective and universal — the gift of a poet. “This present moment to become long ago.” from Danger on Peaks After the reading, Snyder took questions. A young man asked him “Is Buddhism useful?” Snyder responds with twinkling eyes and an impish smile, “No, it is more than that, it’s beautifully useless.”
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