Bly, Robert - Alan Helms (review date 1977)

Alan Helms (review date 1977)

SOURCE: Helms, Alan. Review of Sleepers Joining Hands, by Robert Bly. Partisan Review 44, no. 2 (1977): 284-93.

[In the following review of Sleepers Joining Hands, Helms judges Bly's forays into the Whitmanesque and the confessional mode of poetry to be lacking.]

The experience of reading Sleepers Joining Hands, Robert Bly's first large-press book since his National Book Award winning The Light Around The Body, is a bit like slogging your way through a violent storm.

The book begins in deceptive calm, with “Six Winter Privacy Poems”:

6

When I woke, new snow had fallen.
I am alone, yet someone else is with me,
drinking coffee, looking out at the snow.

Bly's central theme, beautifully rendered: the duality of inner and outer worlds, the deep duality of a consciousness often conflicted but existing here in a momentary state of peaceful...

[The entire page is 1716 words long]

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