The Holy Forest by Robin Blaser (Coach House) is not a book about ecology, although it does remind us of the concept of the sacred grove, which is central to aboriginal belief systems in which language and knowledge are said to come from certain lands or natural sites. Robin Blaser has been a resolute explorer of this terrain between language and knowledge and the ways in which we construct belief systems from our imagination of it. The Holy Forest is his collected work on this theme. For these are the "books"—conceived in a way he and Jack Spicer defined the term in the 50s and 60s—on which Blaser has been working for the last thirty years, and to hold them in one volume is to feel them as a kind of bible. Blaser's celebrated opaqueness is everywhere in evidence, and one has to admire the painstaking editorial work that Stan Persky and Michael Ondaatje no doubt carried out. In a time when poetry has become advertising, and pop lyrics are discussed in English classrooms, it behooves us to recall, as one does when reading Blaser, that poetry was once a vocation—a calling.