A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds: New and Selected Prose Gary Snyder Counterpoint Press 263 pp. Available from Powell's Books.

In the interest of full critical disclosure, my place in space while reading this book was New Jersey Transit and the New York City subway ecosystem (usually the 1, 2, A, C, or E bioregions to be exact). My nature trails were in Penn Station, elbowing my way through domestic Long Islander herds waiting for the LIRR. The most common chirping I heard was that of cell phones and the baying of drunken Rangers fans. The featured flora was whatever was growing on the spilled food and drink on the floor of the train cars -- don't ask me what it is, I don't want to know. I doubt Mr. Snyder would, either. And keep away from the watersheds. You can catch diseases there.

But New York City is not Gary Snyder's ecosystem of choice, for which we should be grateful. Born in 1930, Snyder was raised in Western Washington and attended Reed College. He became a writer, poet (yep, this is that Snyder of the Beat scene) and logger. In this book of prose, his Beat years in California are lightly represented with two essays combined into one: "Notes on the Beat Generation and the New Wind" and a short sweet piece called "North Beach". Here he describes both the geographical and social scene in San Francisco as an ecosystem:

"When we of the fifties and after walked into it, 'walk' was the key word. Maybe no place else in urban America has such a feel of on-foot: narrow streets, high blank walls, and stair-step steeps of alleys and white-wood houses cheap to rent; laundry flapping in the foggy wind from flat-topped roofs. Like Morocco, or ancient fertile-crescent pueblos."

Snyder left California for ten years while he studied Buddhism in Japan, but returned in late 1968. The bulk of the essays in this collection were written from the early '70s to the early '90s, after settling himself and his family in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. It's apparent from the essays that he was always attuned to the natural world, but the years of Buddhism, the back-to-nature movement of the late '60s and early '70s, and a growing appreciation for aboriginal culture -- of peoples, animals and plants -- opened him to a new understanding of the world.

This understanding informs Snyder's writing. It's in the introductions he wrote to other people's work, the commencement lecture he gave at Reed College, and the other talks he's given around the world. His writing is gracious and lovely, but demands buy-in of basic ideas -- and that can be pretty rough going for some of us, including me.

Snyder relates his most basic relationship to the natural world through concrete descriptions of living in/with nature: "You are called to a hopeful steadiness of nerves as you lift a morsel of chicken to the mouth with four meat bees following it every inch of the way" ("The Porous World").

Then he takes these experiences and moves outward/inward. On the experience of understanding an ecosystem and one's interdependency within it, he writes:

"The ethics or morality of this is far more subtle than merely being nice to squirrels. The biological-ecological sciences have been laying out (implicitly) a spiritual dimension. We must find our way to seeing the mineral cycles, the water cycles, air cycles, nutrient cycles as sacramental-and we must incorporate that insight into our own personal spiritual quest and integrate it with all the wisdom teachings we have received from the nearer past. The expression of it is simple: feeling gratitude to it all; taking responsibility for your own acts; keeping contact with the sources of the energy that flow into your own life (namely dirt, water, flesh)" ("Rehabilitation")

Prior to the development of metal weapons, Snyder insists, "cross-cultural distrust is resolved through trade, exchange or periodic gambling games, festivities, and singing together" ("The Politics of Ethnopoetics"). Okay. Umm. Right. That happens at all the shows I go to.

This is my dilemma with Snyder's writing and these essays. I find myself in an impossible tug-of-war between wanting to surrender to the beauty and generosity of his gorgeous writing and world vision, and of fighting back intense annoyance at its over-simplistic, irony-free view (which, not surprisingly, often seems most present in his mid-'70s writings). I get to the point of wanting to shove the book back in my bag after reading yet again about the bliss of the aboriginal state, but Snyder always produces a perfect gem of prose or insight that keeps me reading. After all, this is the man that wrote the Smokey the Bear Sutra. His writing may be irony-free, but it's not humor-free.

So I keep on reading. After all, no one else could describe a renovation of a library at U.C. Davis to me like this: "As for this new wing itself, it is an elegant structure of cast-in-place concrete -- that is to say, a transformation of water-washed gravels, a riverbed stood on end" ("The Forest in the Library").

Taking concrete back to its original source? Even for us resolute urban types, nature can show up where you least expect it. Gary Snyder is here to show us the way.

-- Kristen St John

Counterpoint Press publishes serious literary work, with an emphasis on natural history, science, philosophy and contemporary thought, history, art, poetry, and fiction. In the short time Counterpoint Press has been publishing, its authors have received many awards including: the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen Poetry Prize, the T.S. Eliot Award, the PEN Translation Prize, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Times, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Harold Morton Landon Prize from the Academy of American Poets.