[Gary Snyder] occasionally makes his ideas too obvious. His new collection, Axe Handles, ends with a painfully clear commitment to North American ecology: "I pledge allegiance to the soil / of Turtle Island, / one ecosystem / in diversity / under the sun / With joyful interpenetration for all." The new book hops along the ground instead of flying in the upper ether of Buddhist poetry. A good many poems are relatively disconnected I-do-this-I-do-that Zen diaries, which get wearisome. But in other moments, Snyder does remind us of his strengths: his strange tunefulness, as if he were strumming some kind of weird Japanese instrument, his ability to embrace the wild or the savage, as if he were a peasant in closer touch with real life than the rest of us.

Paul Berman, in a review of "Axe Handles," in The Village Voice, Vol. XXIX. No. 18, May 1, 1984, p. 44.