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Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

  • Author: Robert Bly
  • First Published: 1985
  • Type of Work: Poetry
  • Genres: Poetry

Robert Bly’s concern with the relationships between the sexes is an outgrowth of his well-known earlier poems that proselytize woman’s civilizing influence on man. Here, Bly frequently explores facets of the male psyche, left bewilderingly incomplete without access to the feminine. In “Fifty Males Sitting Together,” the poet imagines fifty males as reeds, each with its own thin “thread of darkness inside.” While they aspire to grow upward, they meanwhile feel “relaxed,” rooted in the (feminine) mud.

In “The Indigo Bunting,” a poem of controlled passion and classical forthrightness, the poet awaits the return of his beloved, whom he imagines returning, “not swerving,” like the indigo bunting “passing over two/ thousand miles of ocean.” It is the presence of this “firmness” that “Disdains the trivial/ and regains the difficult,” that the poet loves most.

Elsewhere, the poet bravely owns up to his shortcomings as a partner. He identifies these faults as the result of the male impulse to idealize and be swept away (“the hurricane carries/ off the snail”). Typically, Bly roots his arguments in natural images, thereby naturalizing the human plight and assuaging blunt human loneliness (“The birches live where no one else comes,/ deep in the unworried woods”).

One of Bly’s presiding themes is that of contentment (or its lack, which he identifies as a male predisposition). In “A Third Body,” the poet imagines a man and a woman sitting together contentedly so that their mingled breaths create a third body, a kind of genie whom they worship as the product of their mutual peace.

Bly’s poems imply a natural interconnectedness and continuity among living beings. In this collection, he superimposes traditional expressions of continuity: “In the month of May when all leaves open,/ I see when I walk how well all things/ lean on each other.” Clearly, after many years of striving for an original perspective, Bly has found himself knocking at the storehouse of the great tradition of English poetry. There are many allusions to this tradition here, and since that tradition is grounded on the theme of the poet and his beloved, Bly has come to the right place.

LOVING A WOMAN IN TWO WORLDS will not convince those who find Bly’s poems overly mystical and mannered that the poet has made a sensible breakthrough. Nevertheless, admirers will be pleased to find that the poet has reconciled himself to the mainstream of poetry while displaying his characteristic concentration and abrupt associations that lead to insight. This is a warm book and, in its way, as daring as anything Bly has done in years.