Stealing Sugar from the Castle: Selected and New Poems, 1950--2013
*Starred Review* Bly’s first comprehensive selection of his work since Eating the Honey of Words (1999) makes the impact of a fresh, new book, even if it repeats much of the same contents. This is not just a matter of the inclusion of more than a decade’s worth of newer poetry, most of it in Bly’s adaptation of the Persian-Indian ghazal, a form in which he plainly revels. Rather, it is that this selection indelibly presents Bly as the great successor to Whitman and Pound, with neither the smarmy bonhomie of the former nor the captiousness of the latter. In the ease and appropriateness of his biblical, legendary, and ancient-historical allusions, Bly contains as much as either of his predecessors, and he gives voice to it more comprehensively. He speaks as “Robert,” to be sure, but also in the voice of humanity. 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 Leaves of Grass, this collection is a monument, not to self but to us. --Ray Olson