Collected Poems

Starred review from August 1, 2018
This big book corrals all 14 of Bly's original collections of poems, minus the previously uncollected pieces in his several self-selections, such as Stealing Sugar from the Castle (2013), and his translations. The early collections, including the National Book Award-winning The Light around the Body (1967), seem to show a classical Chinese poet reincarnated in southwest Minnesota farm country but hardly confined to it, ranging east to MacDougal Street and Merritt Parkway to Washington to protest the Vietnam War, west to the Pacific coast and China. The 1980s books lay the groundwork for the mythopoetic men's movement launched by Bly's prose best-seller, Iron John (1990); they incorporate myths from several more cultures besides those touched on in his early poems. The 1990s collections communicate more directly than those before and after them; not coincidentally, they include a suite on his father's dying and many considerations of other poets. The twenty-first-century volumes teem with examples of the ramage, Bly's invention consisting of 6 tercets of 10- to 13-syllable lines; occasionally, Bly borrows from the ghazel to have every tercet end with the same word. In them, he further develops the deep image poem (a career-long passion), in which physical and mental images associate across time, places, and cultures by means of emotion and revelation rather than logic or rhetoric. Magnificent.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)