Robin Blaser first emerged as a poet during the late 1940s and early 1950s when he became a key participant with Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan in the Berkeley contingent of the San Francisco Renaissance. While his work has been recognized by writers Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Bernstein, George Bowering, B.P. Nichol, and Sharon Thesen and has influenced literary communities in San Francisco and Vancouver, to most American and Canadian critics he is still, as one reviewer put it, "alien exotica." Born and reared in the United States yet having lived in Vancouver since 1966 and become a Canadian citizen, Blaser has struck some critics as too Canadian, others as too American, and many as simply too esoteric to trouble much over; to date, little has been written about his work.

The dearth of criticism is at least partly attributable to the nature of Blaser's...