“It was Gary Snyder’s short 1965 book of poetry, Riprap,” writes Jonathan Stalling in the introduction to 7+2: A Mountain Climber’s Journal, “where English readers gained access to something close to mountaineering poetry. It is not a coincidence that Snyder’s work arises from melding of his own upbringing among the Mazamas mountain range in Oregon with the Buddhist poetics of Han Shan, whose work appears in translation in the same volume. Taken together with the pioneering English translations from Arthur Waley to contemporary translators like David Hinton, English readers have become more familiar with the cosmological mountain poetics of China and, little by little, English has taken its first steps into writing its own mountain verse.” More…