Awards
Winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Synopses & Reviews
These Pulitzer Prize-winning poems and essays by the author of range from the lucid, lyrical, and mystical to the political. All, however, share a common vision: a rediscovery of North America and the ways by which we might become true natives of the land for the first time.
Review
"'Turtle Island' is our 'Walden'—a sustained poetic testimony that we can, perhaps must, learn to live in psychic health with less organized human context, and more wild context, than civilization offers. Snyder describes nature better than any other living poet; moreover, like Wordsworth, he makes us feel the centering power, beyond the visible, that nature has for his mind. He is also a fine poet of nature-in-man, as in 'The Bath'—a joyful and dignified corrective to bodily shame, and the over-extended incest taboos that induce it. Snyder is weak only in homily and satire, where his designs tend to be too obvious." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)