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PARTISAN REVIEW
Pasternak once remarked that a book is nothing more than a "cubic
piece of burning, smoking conscience." The pyre Bly lit with his war
poems continues to smoulder and disturb our night.
Bly's prose poems deserve an essay of their own. While his med–
itations on the prosody of prose are provocative, the things them–
selves embody and magnify some of the weaknesses of Bly's less suc–
cessful verse . They can be obvious,
faux-naif,
packed with postur–
ings and banal observations. Memorable exceptions include "The
Hockey Poem" with its Ovidian metamorphoses, and "The Dead
Seal" which, as a meditation on death and physical decay, is every
bit as good as Richard Eberhardt's much anthologized "The Ground–
hog."
A "selected poems" may become either a tombstone or a
capstone to a career. In Bly's case, however, it appears to be a step–
ping stone. The poems included here from his last two books,
The
Man in the Black Coat Turns
and
Loving a Woman in Two Worlds
are his
finest yet. Previously Bly's community seemed comprised of trees ,
turtles , horses, and the poet's own soul. Now that humans have
entered as subjects of the poems, the tensions between public and
private, outward and inward, have diminished . Bly writes about try–
ing to come to terms with his father and about learning his own
limitations as a father and a lover:
I know there is someone
who tries to teach us.
He
has four ways
to do that. . .
. . . I usually ignore
the earlier three ,
and learn by falling .
"Four Ways of Knowledge"
He speaks, with startling luminosity, about loving a woman simulta–
neously muse and mortal:
And we did what we did , made love attentively, then
dove into the river, and our bodies joined as calmly
as the swimmer's shoulders glisten at dawn .
"The Good Silence"
