Bly, Robert - Joyce Carol Oates (review date 1973)

Joyce Carol Oates (review date 1973)

SOURCE: Oates, Joyce Carol. Review of Sleepers Joining Hands, by Robert Bly. Modern Poetry Studies 4, no. 3 (winter 1973): 341-44.

[In the following review of Sleepers Joining Hands, Oates praises Bly's “powerful,” “unified,” and prophetic collection.]

[Sleepers Joining Hands] is a remarkable collection of poems, in fact one of the most powerful books of any kind I have read recently. It is beautifully unified—the “sleepers of the world” do indeed join hands in Robert Bly's imagination—and it possesses the kind of internal development, the accumulation of dramatic tension, one usually associates with a single work, whether of poetry or prose. The book is divided into three sections, the first consisting of a number of brief meditative poems, some longer works (“Hair,” for one) that move rapidly and dizzyingly through surrealistic, mock-causal observations, and...

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