Regarding Wave: Poetry
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"Wild nature as the ultimate ground of human affairs"––the beautiful,
precarious balance among forces and species forms a unifying theme for
the new poems in this collection. The title, Regarding Wave,
reflects "a half-buried series of word origins dating back through the
Indo-European language: intersections of energy, woman, song and 'Gone
Beyond Wisdom.'" Central to the work is a cycle of songs for Snyder's
wife, Masa, and their first son, Kai. Probing even further than Snyder's
previous collection of poems, The Back Country, this new
volume freshly explores "the most archaic values on earth… the fertility
of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the
terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance,
the common work of the tribe…”
Born in 1930 in San Francisco, Gary Snyder grew up in the rural Pacific Northwest. He graduated from Reed College in 1951 with degrees in anthropology and literature, and later, 1953–56, studied Japanese and Chinese civilization at Berkeley, returning there to teach in the English Department. After participating in the San Francisco revival, the beginning of the beat poetry movement, with Ginsberg, Whalen, Rexroth and McClure, Snyder quietly went off to Japan in 1955 where he stayed for eighteen months, living in a Zen monastery. In 1958, he joined the tanker "Sappa Creek" and traveled around the world. In early 1959 he again returned to Japan where, apart from six months in India, he studied Kyoto under Oda Sesso Roshi, the Zen master and Head Abbot of Daitoku-Ji. He has spent further time (1966–67) in Japan on a Bollingen research grant. In 1969 he received a Guggenheim grant and toured the Southwestern United States visiting various Indian tribes.