Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Gary Snyder once compared his epic poem Mountains and Rivers Without End to Class V rapids: if you're going to make it, you're going to need a guide; this collection of commentaries and background readings is that guide. The result of a Mountains & Rivers Workshop, which invited writers, teachers, and scholars to speak on various aspects of Snyder's great work, this book captures the excitement of these gatherings and invites us to enter the poem through essays and talks by Wendell Berry, Robert Hass, and others, and includes an interview with Snyder himself.

"A Sense of the Whole comes as a welcome commentary, a companion to the myths, histories, and scientific tracks that cross through Snyder's work. You can read McClure's thoughts, as well as insights by the poets Wendell Berry, Robert Hass, and Nanao Sakaki; by the Buddhist scholars Stephanie Kaza, Carl Bielefeldt, and others. In particular the contributors cast light on the poem's use of East Asian landscape painting, its carefully informed encounter with the Shamanic-Buddhist Noh theater of Japan, and on the geographical range of the poem."—Andrew Schelling