Perhaps the greatest generation

Originally printed in Kyoto in 1959 where he was then living as a disciple of Zen Buddhism, “Riprap’’ broke new ground in a radically different spirit than the landmark collections of confessional verse by Robert Lowell (“Life Studies’’) and W.D. Snodgrass (“Heart’s Needle’’) published the same year: scrupulously composed poems of concise surfaces and contemplative depths that implicitly linked the life of the mind to living off the grid. About 10 years later the book would be packaged with a clutch of Snyder’s deft translations of the T’ang poet Han-Shan’s “Cold Mountain Poems.” To revisit the book all these decades later (and to listen to Snyder intoning the poems with flinty aplomb on the accompanying CD) is to appreciate its lasting value as something more telling than a period artifact: paradigm-shifting wordsmithing that already marks the young poet as a master of free-verse and a rare American savant in non-Western modes of expression and perception, still earning its keep with no trace of moss or rust.