Gary Snyder.
 
New York: New Directions, 1978. Octavo. Cloth boards in a black and white dust wrapper. Faint foxing. 54 pages. First edition, flat-signed by the author. Near fine.
 
Poet laureate of Deep Ecology, Thoreau of the Beats, and the inspiration for the character Japhy Ryder in Kerouac's Dharma Bums. The author's first book of poems originally published in 1960 by Totem Press in association with Corinth Books, revised in a new format with Snyder's name misspelled on the spine. Snyder wrote the book after losing his job as a fire lookout in the North Cascades. Those were the days of McCarthy, when people like Snyder were flushed from government service. In the end the world was better for it, as Snyder took a job in the logging industry and began thinking about poetry as a vocation. First cloth edition of the seminal work, signed by Snyder.
 
“I set this poem loose on the world some years ago . . . It looks like an old friend I haven’t seen in a while . . . The effort of this kind of poetry remains one of our most challenging enterprises: here on Occupied Turtle Island, we are most of us a still restless population of non-natives who don’t even know the plants or where our water comes from. Myself, raised in the West, in the basin of Puget Sound, what some poets now call Ish Nation, set out like everyone else, to make sense, and to find somehow a way to actually ’belong to the land.’”