Synopses & Reviews
Selected from throughout Robert Bly’s monumental body of work from 1950 through the present,
Stealing Sugar from the Castle represents the culmination of an astonishing career in American letters.
Bly has long been the voice of transcendentalism and meditative mysticism for his generation. Influenced by Emerson and Thoreau, inspired by spiritual traditions from Sufism to Gnosticism, his vision is “oracular” (Antioch Review). From the rich, earthy simplicity of Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962) to the wild yet intricately formal ghazals of My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy (2005) and the striking richness and authority of Talking into the Ear of a Donkey (2011), Bly’s poetry is spiritual yet worldly, celebrating the uncanny beauty of the everyday. “I am happy, / The moon rising above the turkey sheds. // The small world of the car / Plunges through the deep fields of the night,” he writes in “Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River.” Here is a poet moved by the mysteries of the world around him, speaking the language of images in a voice brilliant and bold.
Review
"Here is the essential Robert Bly, 'a man in love with the setting stars,' a dark transcendentalist, a troublemaker, a mourner who keeps seeing the walls splashed with blood, a singer of boundless mysteries, imagination's keeper, a witness to joy. He has been lighting up American poetry for more than sixty years." Edward Hirsch
Review
"[T]his selection indelibly presents Bly as the great successor to Whitman and Pound, with neither the smarmy bonhomie of the former or the captiousness of the latter.... His labor and delight, early and late, is now clearly shown to be the demonstration that all human and nonhuman lives, contexts, and relations are linked by metaphor, that odd mode of understanding by psychological projection and sensory imagination. Like the deathbed edition of , this collection is a monument, not to self but to us." Booklist, Starred Review
Review
"Playful, strange and simultaneously startling... Bly's poetry prizes the imagination for its irrationality, which can take us to beautiful and unexpected places." Elizabeth Hoover
Synopsis
"[Robert Bly] is . . . the most recent in a line of great American transcendentalist writers."--
Synopsis
Bly has long been the voice of transcendentalism and meditative mysticism for his generation. Influenced by Emerson and Thoreau, inspired by spiritual traditions from Sufism to Gnosticism, his vision is oracular (Antioch Review). From the rich, earthy simplicity of Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962) to the wild yet intricately formal ghazals of My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy (2005) and the striking richness and authority of Talking into the Ear of a Donkey (2011), Bly s poetry is spiritual yet worldly, celebrating the uncanny beauty of the everyday. I am happy, / The moon rising above the turkey sheds. // The small world of the car / Plunges through the deep fields of the night, he writes in Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River. Here is a poet moved by the mysteries of the world around him, speaking the language of images in a voice brilliant and bold.
"
Synopsis
Selected from more than ten volumes of poetry from 1950 through 2005, and including Robert Bly’s National Book Award–winning volume
The Light Around the Body,
Stealing Sugar from the Castle showcases the brilliant career of this American master as he moves from the rich, earthy simplicity of
Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962) through the wild, yet intricately formal ghazals of
My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy (2005).
From
“It’s as if Someone Else Is with Me” I’ve been thinking about these little adventures
In morning longing—these embarkations,
Excursions in round hideboats on the sea,
Passing over the beings far below.
Synopsis
Selected from throughout Robert Bly's monumental body of work from 1950 through the present, represents the culmination of an astonishing career in American letters.
About the Author
Robert Bly is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Light Around the Body, winner of the National Book Award, and Talking into the Ear of the Donkey. He is also the author of many works of nonfiction, including Iron John: A Book About Men, which was an international bestseller and a pioneering work in the men's movement. His awards include the Poetry Society of America's Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry. He lives in Minneapolis.