The Back Country is one of Gary Snyder"s most serious engagements with Eastern culture and thought. Much of the book works to achieve a perspective by means of contrast, as in "Hitch Haiku," a series of haiku (a Japanese form of imagistic, syllabic verse) mostly set in the American West. Perhaps the strongest poem is "Oil," in which Snyder envisions a tanker as a needle bringing our addicted nation "long injections of pure oil."