Balanced.

Snyder talks about the ‘long view’. The vision of Pacific America from the high peaks. He was, from the start, a skier, climber, trail walker. These activities took precedence, when he was a schoolboy and young student, over academic work. At the age of 15, in 1945, he completed the ascent of Mount St Helens: ‘Step by step, breath by breath – no rush, no pain.’ The newspaper he read when he came down from the hike, on 13 August, was a day-old copy of the Portland Oregonian. It carried a photo spread of the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

From early on, after seeing Chinese scroll paintings in the museum in Seattle, Snyder adopted a linear continuity of narrative, with everything happening at once: the pilgrim with his staff on the mountain, the bridge over the stream, the forest and the ocean. Diary fragments, named persons, conversations in roadside cafés, bars, truckstops, prayers, chants, native shamanic lore, myths of place: they all enjoyed an equal status and emphasis. The delivery was crafted to move like natural speech, with a leavening of slow-burn humour. This was a country-smart poetry, beautifully balanced between frontier transcendentalism and the long gaze of Asia.

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