Gary Snyder is the poet who worked Sierra trail crews and fire lookouts, spent a decade in a Kyoto Zen monastery, and later won the Pulitzer for Turtle Island. The Back Country, 1968, is four sections that map his life to that point: Far West, the mountain years; Far East, Japan; Kali, India; Back, the return to America. It’s full of short lines, hitchhiking, lovers, meditation, a plain vocabulary of trail, rock, and weather. He was translating Han Shan, the eighth-century Chinese hermit poet, around then, and the influence is all over it. This is the poetry to read alongside his essays.
The Back Country