Pell Mell, the middle voice, the syntax meeting its astonishments in its forward stride looking backwards, imagining an image nation where the heart is always torn—to pieces possessed by the other(s). A book so sure of itself that Blaser can begin, after the act of said-and-done, a series called Great Companions. Lesser poets might, and have, called them “masters.” But only because they lack Robin Blaser’s insistence on the audacious ever-present. A scatter of pearls for Aphrodite, and a lovely place to enter Blaser’s life work, The Holy Forest. As to the plot, Blaser himself has said:

“These poems follow a principle of randonnée —the random and the given of the hunt, the game, the tour. Thus, randonnée is another title of this book, written, so to speak, in invisible ink. These poems are also a further movement in one long work that I call The Holy Forest, though that need not trouble the reader before the forest is full grown. Poems called Image-Nations come and go throughout, never to become a complete nation. And Great Companions of the art of poetry, a series which begins to gather here with Pindar and Robert Duncan, will continue until their voices close The Holy Forest. That’s the plot.”

Born in Idaho in 1925, Robin Blaser became a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance movement. His work was anthologized by Donald Allen in The New American Poetry along with the works of his companions Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Jack Spicer. Blaser came to Canada in 1966 to teach at the newly opened Simon Fraser University where he taught in the English department until his retirement. He became a Canadian citizen in 1972. Poet, scholar and teacher, Robin Blaser has been a mentor to many writers, poets and intellectuals worldwide. A celebration of Robin Blaser’s work, The Recovery of the Public World: Essays on Poetics in Honour of Robin Blaser, edited by Charles Watts and Edward Byrne, was published in the fall of 1998. Blaser passed away in 2009.

Robin Blaser's profile page

“Robin Blaser became a source for poetry’s authority beyond any simplifying place or time.”
—Robert Creeley