Gary Snyder’s Mountains and River’s Without End, is a culmination of poems inspired by eastern Asian landscape and the nature that surrounded him on his travels.

I was inspired and decided to read this book after doing some research on the author and truly thought this would be something beautiful. I have always loved poems. The imagery and energy I can get from reading one has always been so insightful and after hearing it had taken Snyder almost 40-years to finish this poem, it made it just that more powerful.

I have never read something in this context or format before. It was one story just wrapped up into many poems and gave it such a peaceful flow of transition. The book opens with a very energetic and lively poem, Endless Streams and Mountains. Snyder uses such energetic language that really captures and makes a setting for the reader. The nature Snyder describes is in fact the character and it’s what I fell in love with when reading this book. For example when he writes “The path comes down along a lowland stream slips behind boulders and leafy hardwoods, reappears in a pine grove, no farms around, just tidy cottages and shelters…” ( pg.5) readers start to really embrace his surroundings and gain a sense of his emotional state.

How Snyder incorporates novel and poet style of writings to come together so concisely and so smoothly is what really kept me hook. Reading this was something so new for me and I loved trying to figure out where Snyder wanted to take me with his context. How his voice is a relevant part of the book but doesn’t over dominate it is also something I really admired. He is able to creatively build an affect for the reader through his choice of diction, context, symbolism and tone. He eloquently gathers together the subjects about nature and mythology, even philosophy into one. Snyder truly portrays the beauty of the Earth in this book through its elements and what connections human-beings have to them.

For me this book was something more than just a good read. I truly and deeply loved the connection he made to nature and the rest of the world even though his focus was only on a specific place in time. Snyder is purely talented at what he does and how he does it. He knows how to place words and metaphors in a way that moves a reader. Even though he was solely inspired by the Asian culture and scroll paintings he was still able to make a connection to that and the Western side. What this book really did was paint a picture of the specific elements in nature that work together in the world to allow for human interaction. In his poem, The Blue Sky, you really get a sense of his appreciation and sense of wonder about the world. He writes , “Eastward from here, beyond Buddha-worlds ten times as numerous as the sand of Ganges there is a world…”(pg.40) this divinely allows a reader to interpret the way Snyder sees the rest of the world from where he was at that very moment.