TWO POETS
SLEEPERS JOINING HANDS. By Robert Bly. Harper and Row. $5.95.
THE AVENUE BEARING THE INITIALS OF CHRIST INTO THE
NEW WORLD. By Galway Kinnell. Houghton Mifflin. $2.95.
THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES. By Galway Kinnell. Houghton Mifflin.
$4.50.
The experience of reading
Sleepers Joining Hands,
Robert
Bly's first large-press book since his National Book Award winning
The Light Around The Body,
is a bit li ke slogging your way through
a violent storm.
The book begins in deceptive calm, with "Six Winter Privacy
Poems";
6
When I woke, new snow had fallen.
I am alone, yet someone else is with me,
drinking coffee, looking out at the snow.
Bly's central theme, beautifully rendered; the duality of inner and outer
worlds, the deep duality of a consciousness often conflicted but existing
here in a momentary state of peaceful coexistence. It's the American
haiku, fully and quietly accomplished. Compare that with a seclion
from the final poem in the book, "An Extra Joyful Chorus for Those
Who Have Read This Far";
I am a thorn enduring in the dark sky,
I am the one whom I have never met,
I am a swift fish shooting through the troubled waters,
I am the last inheritor crying out in deserted houses
I am the salmon hidden in the pool on the temple floor
I am what remains of the beloved
I am an insect with black enamel knees hugging the
curve of insanity
I am the evening light rising from the ocean plains
I am an eternal happiness fighting in the long reeds.
The distance between that initial, reposeful " I :lm alone" and the final,
frenetic Whitmanesque catalogue of wildly various identifications
shou ld give you some idea of the bumpy ground Bly travels in
Sleepers
Joining Hands.
