[In the following review, Peseroff offers positive evaluation of Bly's Selected Poems.]

I first heard Robert Bly read his poems in the mid-1970s, sitting in the drab, fluorescent-lighted cafeteria of a community college. Most of his audience of students had been brought by their teachers, and stoically waited to have culture imposed upon them. Within the first 30 minutes of a two-hour reading Mr. Bly had every listener leaning forward, enthralled by his stage presence and props as well as by the tenderness of “The Dead Seal,” and by the terror of “Counting Small-Boned Bodies,” which he recited from under an enormous straw mask in a high-pitched, witchy voice. Poetry was no embroidery, it was the fiber of life; a hundred people walked away convinced.

Mr. Bly has never believed that poetry makes nothing happen. For almost 30 years he has been a busy and energetic advocate for certain spiritual, political and literary values; a publisher, translator and shaman. A man who praises privacy and solitude, he writes poems that rush toward and embrace the world, both the outer world, acutely observed in its glory and decay, and the inner world, to him the source of the soul's ecstasy and grief. Reconciling these two worlds has always been his mission as he writes poems meant, in words he quotes from the French prose poet Francis Ponge, to “nourish the spirit of man by giving him the cosmos to suckle.” In Selected Poems, his new collection, he has shaped from both worlds his record of the body's journey and the soul's quest. This is not just an anthology of Mr. Bly's best work; its 11 new essays and its particular method of organization require a fresh look at the poet's achievement.

The book is arranged in nine sections, each introduced by a short essay. Two longer essays, “Whitman's Line as a Public Form” and “The Prose Poem as an Evolving Form,” conclude the book. Although he begins with early poems previously uncollected and ends with excerpts from his most recent volume, Mr. Bly avoids strict chronology. Rather, each section is designed to illustrate a step in the evolution of his poetics.

The third section, for example, includes poems from Silence in the Snowy Fields （1962）, written in a rhapsodic mode, as well as others written in the same mode （“adapted from Waley's translations of Chinese poems, Frank O‘Connor's translations of Celtic poems, and my own translations of Machado, but a certain gaiety carries them along. The line breaks usually come where the thought ends, and bring a moment of “silence”） but published only 17 years later in This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years. Part Five—prose poems from The Morning Glory （1975） and some from The Man in the Black Coat Turns （1981）—precedes （heavily revised） selections from Sleepers Joining Hands （1973） in Part Six. This arrangement allows the poet to contrast prose poems, like “The Starfish” and “A Bouquet of Ten Roses,” that “carry us to the new place on their minute detail, on what they give us to see,” with those written “to turn away from seeing. … While I was still writing the Morning Glory poems, I felt a longing to compose a radical or root poem that would speak to what has its back turned to me.”

          I sent my brother away.
I saw him turn and leave. It was a schoolyard.
I gave him to the dark people passing.
He learned to sleep alone on the high buttes.

(“Poem in Three Parts”)

That is from a poem originally titled “The Shadow Goes Away,” the long poem in Sleepers Joining Hands that immediately follows the poet's 20-page essay. “I Came Out of the Mother Naked.” I regret alterations here to this poem and to other long poems. Mr. Bly omits his homage to the Great Mother, preferring to shift emphasis from the female anima to male images “suggesting Joseph's betrayal of his brother.”

The volume becomes a quest to find a voice to fit the poet and a prosody to fit the poem. After abandoning the iambic “lute of three loudnesses” described in Part One （“I loved the music so much I could have written such lines for the rest of my life, but something in them didn't fit me”） and, I surmise, Harvard University, the poet moved to New York. He sank, through solitude, “past … stones, past Eros, past family affections.” From this period of estrangement came poems of both despair and healing that Mr. Bly would publish 14 years later in The Light Around the Body. It is only after this period that the poet, who had married and returned to his native Minnesota, composed the poems published in his first book. Sympathy between the soul and the countryside is the subject of Silence in the Snowy Fields:

Oh, on an early morning I think I shall live forever!
I am wrapped in my joyful flesh,
As the grass is wrapped in its clouds of green.

(“Poem in Three Parts”)

I know of no contemporary poet, except perhaps Allen Ginsberg in his exuberant poems about sex, who is so unafraid to write about joy.

One of the pleasures of reading Selected Poems is to discover themes, language and imagery that will recur, transformed, throughout the poet's body of work like DNA passed from the acorn to the oak. The poems in Part One may not sound much like Robert Bly, but titles like “Dawn in Threshing Time” and ”from Four Seasons in the American Woods” indicate subjects the poet would write about again and again. “Where We Must Look for Help” presages the “deep image” poems of psychic connections, mythic comparisons and unexpected junctures:

The dove returns; it found no resting place,
It was in flight all night above the shaken seas
Beneath ark eaves
The dove shall magnify the tiger's bed.

(“Poem in Three Parts”)

More surprising is “Schoolcraft's Diary Written on the Missouri: 1830,” a three-page dramatic monologue poem including a good deal of narrative. The speaker observes the conflict between “busy whites” with “steel traps hanging, swung from saddle thongs” and the Sioux, “as still as Hudson's blankets winding them.” He joins a party of men armed to confront a mysterious white apparition stalking the camp.

So armed in case of Sioux, to our surprise
We found a white and wounded Northern Bear
Shot in that day about the snout and head.

(“Poem in Three Parts”)

As well as demonstrating the poet's early and abiding interest in American history, this long poem marks the beginning of his lifelong reliance on narrative.

Throughout his later work he would adapt narrative techniques to the lyric, just as he would appropriate the rhythms of sentences to replace a prosody based on counting syllables:

The boy gets out of high school and reads no more books; the
son stops calling home.
The mother puts down her rolling pin and makes no more bread.
And the wife looks at her husband one night at a party and loves him
no more.

(“Poem in Three Parts”)

Powerful, succinct, poignant, such stories make up another sort of history. The personal connects us to the world's master plot. In fact, Mr. Bly has been able to write successful poems about public events because, for him, the political is personal. His response to the Vietnam War was rooted in grief, not grievance, and he never excluded himself from the darker manifestations of our national consciousness:

We have carried around this cup of darkness.
We hesitate to anoint ourselves.
Now we pour it over our heads.

(“Poem in Three Parts”)

But Mr. Bly is a public poet even in poems without overt political content. Although in Part Four he introduces “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last” with a description of the long, cadenced line inspired by the Bible, Christopher Smart, William Blake and Walt Whitman—a line “that embodies power in a direct way … that throws or catapults itself into the outer world”—even his most intimate and meditative poems, with their frequent use of the pronoun “we,” are designed to instruct and exhort. These poems function like stained-glass windows in a cathedral; their images direct us to wisdom and salvation. Mr. Bly's impulse to teach （some would say preach） unites him to Emerson on his platform, Bronson Alcott in his lyceum and Thoreau （whose nature writings Mr. Bly likens to prose poems） awake in Concord jail. He is, in a sense, the most recent in a line of great American transcendentalist writers.

Selected Poems begins with images of “this smoking body plough＼ing］ toward death” and ends with a series of love poems, including the sexy “At the Time of Peony Blossoming”:

When I come near the red peony flower
I tremble as water does near thunder,
as the well does when the plates of earth move,
or the tree when fifty birds leave at once.

(“Poem in Three Parts”)

It is a mellow ending to a good journey, one that is not over yet.