At age ninety-five, Gary Snyder is the last survivor from the group of writers known collectively as the Beat Generation. In 2022, Snyder’s work became part of the Library of America, one of the few living writers so honoured. Gary Snyder: Collected Poems (Library Of America) is a handsome volume of over a thousand pages that includes all eleven of his books of poetry, plus a generous selection of previously uncollected poems. Snyder’s deep interest in Buddhism, and in our relationship with nature, shows up frequently in his writing, as in this poem from Axe Handles (1983): “As the crickets’ soft autumn hum / is to us, / so are we to the trees // as are they // to the rocks and the hills.” Snyder eventually settled into a hand-built home he named Kitkitdizze, situated in the San Juan Ridge area of northern California. One of his neighbours on that ridge, for too brief a time, was Snyder’s good friend and fellow poet Lew Welch, who had hoped to build a small cabin for himself on a portion of Snyder’s land. Welch’s life and poetry is explored in He, Leo (Oregon State University Press), a recent biography by Ewan Clark. Welch left his first marriage and a career in advertising (some claim that it was Welch who coined the famous slogan for Raid insecticide: “Raid Kills Bugs Dead”) for the bohemian life of a Beat-era poet. Welch’s poetry is collected in Ring of Bone (1979), which takes its title from this poem: “I saw myself / a ring of bone / in the clear stream / of all of it // and vowed, / always to be open to it / that all of it / might flow through // and then heard / ‘ring of bone’ where / ring is what a // bell does.” Welch drank heavily throughout his life and struggled with depression; before he could build his cabin near Snyder’s, he walked away one May morning in 1971, age forty-four, into the wilderness surrounding Kitkitdizze. His body was never found.