The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser (Revised and Expanded Edition)

Author: Robin Blaser

Editor: Miriam Charles

Publisher: University of California Press (2008)

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.

"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