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Zen Forest
Carolyn Zonailo
Caitlin Press
Vancouver, B.C.
1987

Carolyn Zonailo is a West Coast lyric poet. Born and raised in Vancouver, she traveled extensively in British Columbia with her family. Previous books include The Wide Arable Land, and A Portrait of Paradise. In Zen Forest she continues to explore relationships between psyche, language and landscape.

Critical Praise for Zen Forest

“…in her Zen Forest she remains closely attached to physical presences, sensing their manna, and, despite her Buddhist title, I would see her poetry as expressing a deep Taoist empathy with the natural world.”

George Woodcock, B.C. Bookworld

     “Zen Forest by Carolyn Zonailo is a substantial work. Opening its pages, we are confronted with a wide range of subject matter and styles: personal meditations, recollections, chants, charms, a witch's spell, an adaptation of the childhood rhyme-and-prayer, ‘Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep’, an imitation of Wallace Steven's ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, lines after a poem by Theodore Roethke, and a long, discursive poem on Vancouver's beaches… A gifted lyricist who spent a lot of time at her craft, Zonailo writes with a depth, a quality of spiritual insight, which is delightful.”

Mona Elaine Adilman, Canadian Poetry

“Carolyn Zonailo…is more than a poet of promise, she is already a poet of some achievement. Her work is distinguished by a diligent commitment to imaginative growth.”

Marya Fiamengo, Canadian Literature

     “Carolyn Zonailo's Zen Forest is a densely packed collection of poems about spiritual experience. The experience of death is one of the central concerns.”

Lavinia Inbar, Capilano Review