Robert Bly's new book of poems [The Man in the Black Coat Turns] has three untilted sections, each with a loose stylistic unity. The first section includes poems that will be familiar to readers of The Light Around the Body (1967) and Bly's eight other previous volumes. Thematically the section deals with blocked energies and institutional failure (“the Empire / dying in its provincial cities”), but there are also hope and “days that pass in / undivided tenderness.” An elegy for Pablo Neruda is included as well, perhaps Bly's most touching, scrupulous poem. Throughout, Bly tries to release the numinous qualities of everyday things, and to bring into everyday consciousness the Jungian perspectives of oneiric space and time.

The second section is comprised of six prose poems, and the longest and best of these is “Finding an Ant Mansion.” Here Bly's spiritual allegorizing is starkest and most forceful, as he literally domesticates a natural object, a “wood-chunk,” and in the process focusses his associative search for a “complete soul home.” After a careful, almost microscopic description, ecstatically heightened, he has the “mansion” harbor “the souls of the dead,” particularly those of his relatives and neighbors. While turning the wood into a memorial of human labor and destiny, he is also freed to see it as subject to natural forces, “still open to the rains and snows.” In many ways the poem epitomizes Bly's work in the genre of the prose poem, where he has successfully joined the vigor of natural history to the ecstasies of desire and memory. The prose poems are to my mind Bly's best work, because his ear is resistant to fixed measures and he works more comfortably with a prose rhythm that relies on an alternation of intensity and relaxation of stress and watchfulness. Many poets turn slack in the prose poem, becoming indulgent in their use of imagery and too precious in their cadences. But Bly, having absorbed such French models as Ponge, finds in this genre just the right mixture of play and contemplative energy. In a sense we can see Bly at work in his prose poems; he has less need to hide the secret springs of his thought and feeling, and so puts us closer to the heart of his enterprise.

The third section of this book contains a dozen poems, all demanding and different from what have come to be Bly's distinctive lyric forms. These will take some getting used to even for Bly's partisan readers, but they show us he is genuinely a poet of growth. His whole project and ethic are founded on the principle of growth, on breaking through convention and repression to reinvigorate the joys of transformation and discovery. He has lived up to his own demands in this regard.

But a few of the poems in this section are for me unsuccessful, most clearly “A Sacrifice in the Orchard” and “What the Fox Agreed to Do.” These rely on images too exclusively, or make too great a demand on their own centering thrusts by excessive “leaping.” Imagistic density and associative leaping are central elements of structure in Bly's work, of course, but if used too drastically or too purely, they harm the overall effect. This is only another application of the aesthetic truism that any stylistic feature cannot in itself sustain a well-made artifact.

The best poems of the third section, however, are challenging because they extend the variety of Bly's structures. Here the best examples are “Four Ways of Knowledge,” “Crazy Carlson's Meadow,” and “Words Rising.” These poems are distinctive, but they share some features, specifically a concern with plotting the mind's curves and submersions on its way to self-awareness. Still far from being a discursive poet, Bly has turned from the sheer enactment of imagistic condensation and expansion (which sometimes made his poems too willful, too driven, despite his claims of spontaneity), to a subtle examination of the intersections of waking and archaic consciousness. These examinations require differing structures, so the pace of the poem's unfolding varies more frequently. There is more abstract language than Bly formerly allowed (“Noble loneliness held him.”), and more reliance on setting a scene. Certain themes persist and are carried over from the first two sections, especially the need to confront and accept the father, but there is a feeling of improvisation, of true searching, despite a more formalized sense of structure. “Well, if I know how to live, / why am I frightened?” Bly asks in one poem. In another he answers, speaking of the habit of ignorance and the need to “learn by falling:” “This time we live it, / and only awaken years later.” To put it simply, Bly is showing us how he's learned that there is more than one approach to the deep, more than one sounding of the cave, and so there must be many different lines and many different songs.