Paul Blackburn – The Nets (1961)

“… But a rather different influence is reflected in (Paul) Blackburn’s next book, The Nets. Composed mostly in Spain and southern France from 1954 to 1957 (though not published until 1961 in New York), The Nets contains a number of poems structured around the numerology and symbolism of the Celtic tree alphabet as explicated in Robert Graves’s The White Goddess (1947); Blackburn had early on admired this influential work and visited with Graves a number of times in Mallorca. The best of the other Nets poems, less allusive—and less obscure—also tend to give a mythic cast to ordinary events of Blackburn’s life in Europe, while keeping them firmly anchored to the present. …”
Poetry Foundation
[PDF] The Nets