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.

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.

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