Review of Robert Bly's earliest collection, published in 1962. According to Robert Bly's personal website, Silence in the Snowy Fields "disarmed readers and critics with its clear-sighted intelligence and apparent simplicity."
Review of Robert Bly's earliest collection, published in 1962. According to Robert Bly's personal website, Silence in the Snowy Fields "disarmed readers and critics with its clear-sighted intelligence and apparent simplicity."
Review of Robert Bly's earliest collection, published in 1962. According to Robert Bly's personal website, Silence in the Snowy Fields "disarmed readers and critics with its clear-sighted intelligence and apparent simplicity."
Bly's third volume is organized around an amazing essay that has defined his later work with gender issues, "I Came Out of the Mother Naked." Also includes his ferocious antiwar poem, "The Teeth Mother Naked at Last," and the ambitious title poem, a symbolic autobiography cast in visionary, Jungian images. One of Bly's most intellectually challenging volumes.
"Published in 1986, Bly's first selected poems differs significantly from his more recent selection, Eating the Honey of Words. Bly radically revises poems from Sleepers Joining Hands especially. Each section is prefaced with brief but illuminating essays tracing the evolution of Bly's poetry from book to book." (Robertbly.com)
These 1977 prose poems delight in the wild "leaps" and associative connections discovered by the meditative mind in solitude. A showcase for Bly's imaginative reach at its most muscular, this book features one of Bly's most ecstatic affirmations of physical love, "We Love This Body," as well as the famous poem, "Finding the Father."
"In this 1979 collection, Bly revisits the western Minnesota terrain and plainspoken style of his first collection, Silence in the Snowy Fields. While in many ways a sequel to Snowy Fields, the poems here reflect a deepened awareness of Sufism and Jung that relates them spiritually and psychologically to Camphor and Gopherwood and Black Coat." (Robertbly.com)
"This 1981 collection, with its mythological resonance and intricate stanza forms, was one of Bly's most revolutionary in its time. "Black Coat" is the point where Bly's poetry meets his fascination with the male psyche, laying the poetry foundation for his subsequent work with men and his prose work, Iron John" (Robertbly.com)
This is an interview with Robert Siegel (the host), and Allen Ginsberg/Gary Snyder, where Siegel discusses with the two about a specific reading some time ago, "Howl".