Poet Gary Snyder has been described as the elder statesman of the natural world for his emphasis on the environment and nature. (Photo courtesy of Shoemaker Hoard Publishing)

By Jeff Pelline, jeffp@theunion.com
12:01 a.m. PT May 1, 2008

Pulitzer-prize winning poet Gary Snyder, of the San Juan Ridge, Wednesday won the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize - one of the nation's most prestigious and largest literary awards.

Snyder, 77, who began writing in the '50s as a member of the beat movement along with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, essays and translations.

"His poetry is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we forget that relation," said Christian Wiman, chair of the selection committee.

The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honors a living U.S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition, according to the award committee. During the past 20 years, the Lilly Prize has awarded more than $1 million.

The judges stated the following in making their selection. "Gary Snyder is a true nature poet: There's no sentimentalism to his work, and he never uses the natural world simply to celebrate his own sensibility.

"A deeply learned and meditative artist, an impassioned ecologist, and a poet of great scope as well as intense focus, Snyder has written poems that we will be reading for as long as we've been reading Robert Frost."

Snyder, born in San Francisco, is a professor emeritus of English at the University of California at Davis. Snyder won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for "Turtle Island."

In 1970, during the back-to-the-land movement, Snyder and his family arrived on the San Juan Ridge.

Snyder has stepped back from teaching and book writing, but he's a thoughful communicator, pointing out in an e-mail to The Union just last week the benefits of native plant landscapings compared with lawns.

"I'm at an age I can grant myself time for being instead of accomplishing," Snyder said in an interview last fall.



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