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The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser
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.
- GenresPoetry
544 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1993
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
March 21, 2026
"The whole thing: just trying to be at home. That’s the plot." ~Robin Blaser
I read the Holy Forest much like a porpoise pricks its way through the open sea: skimming the surface, galavanting past the vast loom and lurk of half-seen leviathans, pirouetting above the impenetrable basin and beneath the unfathomable sky, catching—now and again—small, silver fishes in my dilettante teeth. For Blaser's work is rather like an ocean—at once encompassing as the Atlantic and minute as a single salty star of spray. All of it: elegant, bizarre, ironic, honest, simple, complex, brutal, beautiful.
This serial style is random and memory driven: personal, but occasionally universal—in the poet's own words, "These poems follow a principle of randonée—the random and the given of the hunt, the game, the tour." One grasps the game; the hunting is harder. It is nebulous only in the way a nebula is: a swirling, confusing beauty. Maybe it is like Blaser's astronomers, watching all night, "as when / certain particulars / catch the eye: / a meteor /and its form." The poetry is there, in the meteor, in its absence, in the moth, in the looking, in the quoting, in the space between the lines, all tumbling toward a singular conclusion: "Language is love."
The magic emerges:
"the mound of cigarette butts moves, the ashes shift,
fall back on themselves like sand, startle out of
the ashes, awakened by my burning cigarette, a brown
moth noses its way, takes flight"
I read the Holy Forest much like a porpoise pricks its way through the open sea: skimming the surface, galavanting past the vast loom and lurk of half-seen leviathans, pirouetting above the impenetrable basin and beneath the unfathomable sky, catching—now and again—small, silver fishes in my dilettante teeth. For Blaser's work is rather like an ocean—at once encompassing as the Atlantic and minute as a single salty star of spray. All of it: elegant, bizarre, ironic, honest, simple, complex, brutal, beautiful.
This serial style is random and memory driven: personal, but occasionally universal—in the poet's own words, "These poems follow a principle of randonée—the random and the given of the hunt, the game, the tour." One grasps the game; the hunting is harder. It is nebulous only in the way a nebula is: a swirling, confusing beauty. Maybe it is like Blaser's astronomers, watching all night, "as when / certain particulars / catch the eye: / a meteor /and its form." The poetry is there, in the meteor, in its absence, in the moth, in the looking, in the quoting, in the space between the lines, all tumbling toward a singular conclusion: "Language is love."
The magic emerges:
"the mound of cigarette butts moves, the ashes shift,
fall back on themselves like sand, startle out of
the ashes, awakened by my burning cigarette, a brown
moth noses its way, takes flight"
July 27, 2007
I had not read a lot of Blaser when I bought this book at the Strand (when it was just out). I had read Cups, and a few things here and there in anthologies, I had heard him read a time or two, and of course, had engraved his essay on the OUTSIDE in the back of the Spicer book into my memory, but I was not prepared for what I found here. Cups, which opens this book, is a serial love poem of such romantic longing and lyric intensity that even though I could never find a copy for sale (that I could afford), I had made a xerox of it from my friend Greg's copy (which was signed, if I remember right) in the early 80's. I used to refer to it when fellow poets badmouthed the idea of writing love poems. Here was an example of how it is done.
But This collection shows the broad range of Blaser's interest, and it shows how unpredictable his writing can be. There are many wide open explorations of public language here, mainly in the Image-Nation series, where advertising & media blend with medieval scholastic musings and disjunct but declarative statements intrude, carrying the poem out into a space where anything can happen.
I had always thought of Blaser as being the third wheel in the triad of Spicer & Duncan, and had not taken his poetry seriously enough, until I read this book. Blaser is and always was a substantial poet in his own right, and is in no way beholden to Spicer or Duncan. I have been through the book from cover to cover three times, and might be due for a fourth time through, any day now.
But This collection shows the broad range of Blaser's interest, and it shows how unpredictable his writing can be. There are many wide open explorations of public language here, mainly in the Image-Nation series, where advertising & media blend with medieval scholastic musings and disjunct but declarative statements intrude, carrying the poem out into a space where anything can happen.
I had always thought of Blaser as being the third wheel in the triad of Spicer & Duncan, and had not taken his poetry seriously enough, until I read this book. Blaser is and always was a substantial poet in his own right, and is in no way beholden to Spicer or Duncan. I have been through the book from cover to cover three times, and might be due for a fourth time through, any day now.
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January 3, 2008Why have I waited so long to read Blaser? He is completely himself, yet evocative of so much I love about literature.... modern and mythic and melodious as can be. There is much to breathe in and say ahhh about in this thorough collection of his work.
May 11, 2023
5 stars alone for "image nation 24 (oh pshaw-", one of the more inspired poems of autobiography and history of the 20th century. only circumstantially a poem about mormonism but remarkable in the moments when it is. the rest is great too. language is love <3
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March 7, 2020Robin Blaser is an astonishing poet. I'd read this back in 1996 cover to cover and so again. Still so many incredible lines.
June 22, 2016
My head responded to new things, to a totally complete approach to poetry often lacking in the finest and the coarsest writers around.
January 15, 2017
This revised and expanded collection of Blaser's poems is a classic. It was my great fortune to hear him read at a celebratory event when the book was released in 2006. Inspiring.
March 12, 2023
new goat unlocked
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April 2, 2019"Collected poems," or serial longpoem? Yes.
The Sacred Wood? No. The Climax Forest? Um, no. The Forest City? No.
There is an ur copula in all of RB's poetry, one that makes Bob Perelman's poetry, which is a poetry that attempts to strip itself of every literary ornament, seem prolifically ornamental in a fabulous way.
The Sacred Wood? No. The Climax Forest? Um, no. The Forest City? No.
There is an ur copula in all of RB's poetry, one that makes Bob Perelman's poetry, which is a poetry that attempts to strip itself of every literary ornament, seem prolifically ornamental in a fabulous way.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews