November 29, 2024. ‘Robert Zend’s Oāb is a visionary work that breaks new ground, even in today’s postmodern literary landscape. Blending the techniques of concrete poetry, visual art, collage, and, of course, the rich tradition of the modernist long poem, Oāb is perhaps the original hybrid text, questioning the boundaries of form and genre in ways that writers today can only aspire to.’ –Kristina Marie Darling

May 20, 2025. ‘Oāb represents one of the great achievements of twentieth century avant-garde poetry and poetics. Epic in scale and form, cosmological in scope and ambition, and playful by nature, Oāb blends humor, ancient myth and spiritualisms, authorial self-reflexivity, various technologies, forms and philosophies until its organic brilliance assumes the mystique and guise of an originary codex. Far ahead of his time, Zend’s modern, exhaustive approach to intertextuality is unprecedented amongst the twentieth century’s post-war, North American poets. Zend’s work, in Oāb especially, is a marvel to behold and contemplate, to read and re-read, inside or outside of time or place.’ –Jared Schickling

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June 28, 1970. ‘The book of Oāb is a creation-story, a salvation-story: a new bible; a miniature universe...’ –Marcel Marceau

August 19, 1971. ‘Oāb is a piece of experimental writing to which I know nothing comparable in Canada...The book should have a considerable impact.’ –Northrop Frye

December 16, 1972. ‘I greatly appreciate Oāb. It is so fantastically and brilliantly inventive, really most exciting. Aspects of it do have an affinity to some of the things I have done in film...only Zend has carried this very much further than anything I attempted. He is a sorcerer, par excellence.’ –Norman McLaren

April 2, 1973. ‘The opening issue of Exile includes, along with more conventional works, an excerpt from an extended visual fiction—Robert Zend’s Oāb—of a kind and quality rarely, if ever, seen in U.S. literary quarterlies. I am floored.’ –Richard Kostelanetz

August 18, 1973. ‘Zend is the author of what may well be the best unpublished book in Canada...Zend wants very badly to make Oāb, when it appears, a stretching of the boundaries of book design. He thinks books like Oāb will be the books of the future.’ The Toronto Star—Robert Fulford

October 24, 1974. ‘Knowing your poem, I understand why you like mine. You created your dream-son the way my magician in “Circular Ruins” created his dream-son. You consider me one of your masters, yet you were my pupil even before reading my work.’ –Jorge Luis Borges

July 16, 1985. ‘I don’t know when I’ve been more bowled over than when I began seeing the Oāb material. One can call it anything: concrete poetry, shape poetry, or just straight doodling, but nothing you call it even starts to describe what it is. Zend tells us that he’s created someone or something called OĀB, then another entity, ÏRDU, gets into the act, and the two of them tumble around a hundred pages of verbal designs and puzzles, playing games like endlessly resourceful children.’ –Northrop Frye

Oāb is 257 pages. Year 2025.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Zend was a Hungarian-Canadian poet, writer, radio documentary producer, and multi-media artist. Born in Budapest in 1929, he spent the early part of his professional life in Hungary editing films, designing movie posters and writing film reviews for the Hungarian National Filmmaking Company. He received a Bachelor of Arts in languages and literature from the Péter Pázmány University in Budapest in 1953. That same year, however, he was blacklisted by the Communist administration for a satirical critique he had written about the food at a political event. From then on, he was forced to patch together a meager livelihood as a freelance journalist, editor, translator (from German, Italian, and Russian), and popular children’s columnist. In 1956, his first book of 100 lyrical poems was about to be published in Budapest, when the Hungarian Revolution broke out but was brutally quashed by the Soviet Union. Fearing severe punishment for having produced and distributed leaflets inciting Hungarians to join the uprising, he seized an opportunity to flee to Canada with his wife and their infant daughter. The years that followed until his untimely passing in 1985 would become an intense period of creativity and collaboration, the details of which are described in this edition of Oāb, Zend’s forgotten masterpiece.