Like his shape-shifting protagonist Gunslinger, that archetypal hero of the Wild West who also happens to be a Greek Sun God and a sophisticated New Philosopher expounding on Heidegger …, Edward Dorn has been unrolling the map of locations for some 20 years now, and the publication of [The Collected Poems: 1956–1974 and Slinger] should finally earn Dorn the reputation he deserves as one of a handful of important poets writing in America today.

If Dorn has never been widely known …, the reasons are not hard to find. Dorn began his career at Black Mountain College in the shadow of Charles Olson, his acknowledged master….

Yet despite such thematic links, Dorn is really quite unlike Olson; he is, for that matter, quite unlike any poet writing today. To call him a "regional poet" (he refers to himself as "a poet of the West—not by nativity but by orientation"), misses the...