Danger on Peaks: Poems

When Gary Snyder applied for the position of fire lookout for the U.S. Forest Service in Washington state in 1952 he wrote in his letter, "So I would like your highest, most remote, and most difficult-of-access lookout." He got the job and was sent to Crater Mountain Lookout, the most remote outpost in Washington. But this wasn't his first encounter with dangerous peaks.
This book, Snyder's first collection of new poems in twenty years, begins with poems about an earlier climb - Snyder's first ascent of Mount St. Helens in 1945. He learned of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the morning of his descent, from newspapers delivered to forestry offices on the slopes of the mountain. Climbing, mountain and backwoods encounters begun in those early years of his life set the tone and provided much of the substance for what has followed in the remarkable life of one of America's most revered poets.
Danger on Peaks contains work in a surprising variety of styles, creating an arc-shaped trail from those earliest climbs to what the poet calls poems "of intimate immediate life, gossip and insight" (some of the poet's most personal work ever). Included are poems that work with the magical lyrics of Old Man Coyote and poems in an American / Japanese hybrid, a form of haibun, "haiku plus prose," which will remind readers as much of William Carlos Williams as Basho. The book ends with poems for the Buddhas of Bamiyan Valley, which were blown up by the Taliban, and the World Trade Towers.