The Late Snow and Lumber Strike of the Summer of Fifty-Four, Book Review Example

The poem of Gary Snyder is very eloquent from the point of view of the writer’s Zen philosophy in the description of the town paralyzed by absence of work, despair caused by the Lumber strike in Virginia. The influence of Zen Buddhism in Snyder who stated that the imperfect is the best is clearly felt in the poem starting with the description of a lost town without any life and movement. Snyder attaches much attention to the description of the miserable, paralyzed environment:

All towns shut down

Hedging the coast road (Snyder)

This beginning suggests a miserable picture of the town in which the work has stopped, and loggers whose main work was forestry, with the landscape seriously changed – ‘no logs on’, ‘loggers all gone fishing’ (Snyder). The image depicted by Snyder shows how hard it is for hard workers living with their work to stop doing what they are best. The author parallels working with thinking, and depicts all this depressive atmosphere at the background of romantic but sad natural circumstances:

Quiet, and summer rain

No place to work…

No place to think or work

Drifting (Snyder).

However, the end of the poem shows the author’s detachment from the strike’s reality and his presence in other circumstances that dictate other necessities to him:

I must turn and go back:

caught on a snowpeak

between heaven and earth

And stand in lines in Seattle.

Looking for work (Snyder).

Despite the beauty and pathos of the Japanese Haiku, the poem ends in a distant way, showing that the author is far from the strike’s reality, though he faces the same life problems and has to struggle for his living the same way as the loggers do, looking for way to think and work. The topic of work and unemployment is very sharp in the present poem, and the author relates it to his actual life and experience vividly at the end of the poem.

References

Snyder, Gary. ‘The Late Snow and Lumber Strike of Fifty-Four’. You Tube Audio File. Retrieved July 13, 2010, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJtnO EQnCow