Robert Bly's latest book [This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood] extends his vision beyond the ranges established in the prose-poems of The Morning Glory (1975). These newer poems are less thoroughly descriptive than those of the earlier volume, and also more directly ecstatic. As does Rilke, Bly sees the world from “the other side of things.” But in place of Rilke's angels Bly uses a body-centered mysticism, drawn from Jacob Boehme and others, to illumine the dark passages of consciousness. Bly's ecstasy often finds him outside the body, considering its glories but also baffled by its nonlinear joys. Here is “The Pail”:

Friend, this body is made of camphor and gopherwood. So for two days I gathered ecstasies from my own body, I rose up and down, surrounded only by bare wood and bare air and some gray cloud, and what was inside me came so close to me, and I lived and died!

Now it is morning. The faint rain of March hits the back of the half-grown trees. The honeysuckle will drip water, the moon will grow wet sailing, the granary door turns dark on the outside, the oats inside still dry.

And the grandfather comes back inquiringly to the farm, his son stares down at the pickup tire, the family lawyer loses his sense of incompetence for a moment, in the barn the big pail is swung out so as to miss the post.

Some of [Richard] Hugo's pastoralism is here, but without nostalgia; there is also [W.S.] Merwin's mythic resonance, but it's grounded in sensory richness. There's at least a hint of Hugo's interlocutor (“Friend”), and the tissue of Merwin's narrative structure (the start of the last two paragraphs), but these points are clearly not the focus of interest. Bly is after the motility of the spirit, that sudden and seemingly arbitrary upshooting of spiritual grace that is not available in ordinary “prosaic” accounts. Using prose in part to trick us into thinking that a clear, rational accounting is being offered, Bly celebrates just the opposite sort of consciousness. Of course the prose-poems of Baudelaire did something of the sort, using a quietly insinuating rhythm to glide over the shifts in perspective. But such a strategy can easily turn precious, or cute, especially if the reader senses it simply as an attempt to provide egregiously “fresh” perspectives, no matter what the consequence to coherence or deeper truths.

Bly has praised the prose-poems of Russell Edson very highly, but I find them consistently predictable, and hence I think their surreal moralism is precious, a willed daffiness, as it were. Bly himself escapes such a pitfall, I believe, because, while the moral urging is always a force in his poetry, its way of being intertwined with celebratory and descriptive energies prevents it from bullying us. Keats said he distrusted poetry that had designs on us, that when we disagreed it reached into its breeches pocket. When you disagree with Bly, he doesn't threaten to draw his pistol, he simply tells you another parable. Bly's prose poems in The Morning Glory showed a patient, rapt attention; in this new book there's an insouciance, a sense of letting go:

A man came to me and began to play music. One arm lay outside the covers. He put the dulcimer in my hand but I did not play it. I went on, hearing.

The poet is less interested in being a singing-master of the soul than in submitting repeatedly to the disciplines of joy. “The body is ready to sing all night, and be entered by whatever wishes to enter the human body singing.” The entrance requirements are few, but more selective than they at first appear. Bly's prose has trained itself to rescue mundane objects and action, like the pail not hitting the post, and to celebrate cosmic power, but at the expense of being able to accept the everyday connectedness of the world. For Bly there are only the breakthroughs, the ecstatic moments, and the quivering just before and after. “We cannot remain in love with what we cannot name.” His prose has become poetic because it rejects the prosaic ligaments of ordinary exposition. Bly wants a religion of single individuals, bound only by a recognition of what lies beyond, not what binds them here. But I sense a rightness in this book, a play with the rhythms and expectations of prose that manages to garner the crucial advantages of poetry.