Robin Blaser, one of the key North American poets of the postwar period, emerged from the "Berkeley Renaissance" of the 1940s and 1950s as a central figure in that burgeoning literary scene. The Holy Forest, now spanning five decades, is Blaser's highly acclaimed lifelong serial poem. This long-awaited revised and expanded edition includes numerous published volumes of verse, the ongoing "Image-Nation" and "Truth Is Laughter" series, and new work from 1994 to 2004. Blaser's passion for world making draws inspiration from the major poets and philosophers of our time—from friends and peers such as Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, Charles Bernstein, and Steve McCaffery to virtual companions in thought such as Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, among others. This comprehensive compilation of Blaser's prophetic meditations on the histories, theories, emotions, experiments, and countermemories of the late twentieth century will stand as the definitive collection of his unique and luminous poetic oeuvre.
Robin Blaser is Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University. Among his many books are The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser (UC Press), Pell Mell, and Syntax. Miriam Nichols is College Professor at University College of the Fraser Valley and editor of Even on Sunday: Essays, Readings, and Archival Materials on the Poetry and Poetics of Robin Blaser.
"In his exquisite articulations of the flowers of associational thinking, Robin Blaser has turned knowledge into nowledge, the 'wild logos' of the cosmic companionship of the real."—Charles Bernstein, author of Republics of Reality: 1975-1995
"Blaser is a fine poet and a superb representative of a tradition that is still undervalued. His work is very important."—Charles Altieri
"Blaser plays his poems like an instrument. The glorious phrases that come forth ring with the memory of fairy tale, myth, gospel, but hang hard on to the modern world in his variety of measure and stress. Blaser is moving us all forward to a less certain result through a forest that has few resting places where the sun stays for longer than a minute."—Fanny Howe
552 pp.6 x 9
9780520258259$31.95|£27.00Paper
Sep 2008