Passage Through India
Reviewed by Michael Hayward
In the early 1960s, the Beat poet Gary Snyder was studying Buddhism in Japan with just one published book of poetry (Myths & Texts) to his credit. During the winter of 1962 he and fellow poet Joanne Kyger set forth with their “backpacks and stout shoes, from Murasakino in Kyoto, to travel by French ship, bottom third class to Ceylon,” at a time when backpacking trips through southeast Asia were very much a countercultural rite of passage. Both he and Kyger kept journals and both accounts were later published: Snyder’s appeared first in Caterpillar magazine in 1972, and in book form in 1983; Kyger’s version of events is still in print as Strange Big Moon. This “expanded and illustrated” edition of Snyder’s Passage Through India (Shoemaker & Hoard) shows how the 1960s bohemian experience can be successfully repackaged as coffee-table fare for those who may once have dreamed of dabbling as bohemians themselves.
