The Back Country

This collection is made up of four sections: Far West poems of the Western mountain country where, as a young man. Gary Snyder worked as a logger and forest ranger; Far East poems written between 1956 and 1964 in Japan where he studied Zen at the monastery in Kyoto; Kali poems inspired by a visit to India and his reading of Indian religious texts, particularly those of Shivaism and Tibetan Buddhism; and Back poems done on his return to this country in 1964 which look again at our West with the eyes of India and Japan. The book concludes with a group of translations of the Japanese poet Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933), with whose work Snyder feels a close affinity. The title, The Back Country, has three major associations; wilderness. the backward countries, and the back country of the mind with its levels of being in the unconscious.