Excerpt from 'Cross-Legg'd' By Gary Snyder Cross-legg'd under the low tent roof, dim light, dinner done, drinking tea. We live in dry old west Lift shirts bare skin lean touch lips-- Old touches. Love made, poems, makyngs, Always new, same stuff life after life. From Mountains and Rivers without End, Counterpoint Press, 1996 UC Davis English professor and poet Gary Snyder is the recipient of Yale University's Bollingen Prize in Poetry, one of the nation's most prestigious literary honors. Every two years, the $50,000 prize goes to a living poet whose work represents the highest achievement in the field of American poetry. The selection committee described Snyder's work as bringing together "the physical life and the inward life of the spirit to write poetry as solid and yet as constantly changing as the mountains and rivers of his American, and universal, landscapes." Snyder, 66, is a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the author of both poetry and nonfiction books. He was one of the major figures of the Beat generation in the late 1950s, and later lived in Japan and became interested in Zen Buddhism. This year's selection committee included the 1995 Bollingen winner, Kenneth Koch; Penelope Laurans, associate dean of Yale College; and J.D. McClatchey, editor of The Yale Review and a widely published poet. In making its selection, the committee said, "Gary Snyder, throughout a long and distinguished career, has been doing what he refers to in one poem as 'the real work.' 'The real work' is writing poetry, for Snyder an unprecedented kind of poetry, in which the most adventurous technique is put at the service of the great themes of nature and of love." Snyder was born in San Francisco in 1930 and graduated from Reed College with a degree in literature and anthropology. Since 1970 he has lived with his family in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Among his books are Riprap, 1959; Regarding Wave, 1970; Turtle Island, 1974--which won a Pulitzer Prize; Axe Handles Poems, 1983; No Nature: New and Selected Poems, 1992; and, most recently, Mountains and Rivers Without End, 1996. Snyder joins a distinguished list of poets who have received the award since the Bollingen Prize was established in 1949. Previous winners include Wallace Stevens, John Crowe Ransom, Marianne Moore, Archibald MacLeish, William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren, James Merrill, May Swenson and John Hollander.