SOURCE: Review of No Nature, in Poetry (Chicago), Vol. 164, No. 3, June, 1997, pp. 167-71.

In the following review of No Nature, Barber argues that Snyder's work has lost an element of vitality and urgency.

With the appearance of Riprap in 1959, Gary Snyder added contour and credence to the emerging claims of a Pound-Williams line of descent in midcentury American poetry, a poetics of open forms and seemingly limitless prescriptive dictums. Snyder's poems looked the part and fit the bill: they were "fields of action," they were "composed in the sequence of the musical phrase," they had a sinewy, backcountry specificity that seemed manifestly in the spirit of "no ideas but in things." They were also suggestibly radical in outlook and orientation, informed by ecology, anthropology, and regional folklore, responsive to the gravitational pull of what would later be coined the "Pacific Rim," altogether aloof to the anxieties of influence...