Selected Poems by Robert Bly

Abstract

Reviews 95 Selected Poems. By Robert Bly. (New York: Harper &Row, 1986. 213 pages, $11.95.) With each new collection of his poems, Robert Bly turns the heads of admirers and most pithy critics toward whatever new direction he takes to “the other world.” For Bly, the poem is a leap toward the other world, the world beyond the self through the breakthrough of “deep image.” Since his first book, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962), a deeply meditative work, Bly has continually surprised us with new experimental stances, radical shifts in voice and form, surreal perspective, and a familiar return to meditative inquiry. Yet, whatever turn Bly has taken, our pursuit has been worthwhile. Over the years, he has offered important maps and tools to explore the range of free verse, as he says, “with distinct memories of form.” With the publication of his Selected Poems, we have not only the repre­ sentative work from 11 books in one volume (including selections from two early unpublished collections), but the advantage of Bly’s own commentary on nearly 40 years’ work. For Bly prefaces selections from each book with candid remarks on his failed experiments and the hopes that fueled his most radical intentions. While critics may view some of this commentary as selfindulgent and superfluous, much of what is contained in these short prefaces is insightful and instructive. At the end of the volume, Bly also includes two essays, one on Walt Whitman and another on the prose poem. Of his anti-Vietnam War poem The Teeth Mother Naked at Last (1970), his most horrifying vision of apocalypse, Bly writes: “The inner and spiral form of [Silence in the] Snowy Fields was not appropriate for poetry about political power, and I decided for The Teeth Mother Naked at Last on a line that embodies power in a direct way. I wrote in a line . . . that throws or catapults itself into the outer world, and composed a number of passages while reciting.” Of his most recent collection, Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985), Bly is more didactic: “If the poem veers too far toward actual events, the eternal feeling is lost in the static of our inadequacies.” If through their work, as Ezra Pound said, poets must “make it new,” Robert Bly cannot be faulted for deviating from Pound’s dictum. Any study of contemporary poetry would be incomplete without surveying Bly’s work, and now his Selected Poems gives us a good vantage point. RICHARD ARDINGER Boise, Idaho ...