The Holy Forest

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
author of Calling Texas.

This volume assembles the collected works of a poet of the San Francisco
Renaissance who has been living in Canada for many years. As Robert
Creeley says in his helpful introduction, Blaser and his friends Jack
Spicer and Robert Duncan were “an almost mythic band,” a triad of
poets. All three were committed to open-form and serial poems, sequences
as open as their form. In The Holy Forest, Blaser intersperses sections
of his almost legendary serial poem “Image-Nation”—poems of
vision, language, and myth that reveal the heavy, almost oppressive
influence of Duncan. A series of humorous anecdotes called “The Truth
Is Laughter” is also scattered through the book. Wit is not one of
Blaser’s strengths. His collection is an important historical document
both as a work of open-form poetics and as a quiet commentary on gay
life. The poems themselves, for all their concern with self, seem rather
detached and abstract. Oddly enough, they engage with the world most
vividly through reactions to news broadcasts. This book is recommended
for all collections emphasizing modern American or Canadian poetry.