Stealing Sugar from the Castle represents the best of more than a half-century of work from one of America's greatest living poets. In 1962, Robert Bly published his first book of poems, Silence in the Snowy Woods. The homespun title belied the amazing influence its deceptively "simple" and profound poems would have on American poetry.
Here is the complete text of "The Teeth Mother Naked at Last," his powerful anti-Vietnam War poem ("Massive engines lift beautifully from decks..."). Here are many of his masterful prose poems, including the moving "The Dead Seal," along with "deep image" poems and ghazals. Always the careful observer, Bly starts many of his poems with "the act of" words, like "looking" (at aging faces, the stars), "listening" (to the sitar before dawn, old music). Sadly, we'll have to look elsewhere for Bly's brilliant translations of other poets, such as the Nobel laureates Pablo Neruda and Tomas Tranströmer.
Now 85, Bly suffers from Alzheimer's. Let us rejoice in this retrospective--and the small handful of new poems it includes. Let us be sad that he was never chosen as the nation's poet laureate. Let us now praise a great poet while he's still here to chuckle at the praise, smile and read us a poem like "Taking the Hands" in that singularly rich, Midwestern voice:
"Taking the hands of someone you love,
You see they are delicate cages...
Tiny birds are singing
In the secluded prairies
And in the deep valleys of the hands."
--Tom Lavoie, former publisher