Pell Mell

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 randonn e --the random and the given of the hunt, the game, the tour. Thus, randonn e 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."