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Review of Robert Bly's new poetry book

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dfmnola
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Review of Robert Bly's new poetry book

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Hi friends,

My latest book review published today at The Rumpus, regarding Robert Bly's book of selected poems called Stealing Sugar From The Castle. Hope it helps you decide to read it!

http://therumpus.net/2013/11/stealing-s ... obert-bly/
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DWill

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Re: Review of Robert Bly's new poetry book

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I have just a nodding acquaintance with Bly's work. I'm also not very faithful in keeping up a steady reading of poetry. Your review had its intended effect, to make me think I should do more of that, and to read this poet in particular.
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Review of Robert Bly's new poetry book

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Thank you Damon, that is a beautiful review.

My father is an old friend of Robert Bly, and we stayed on his farm in Minnesota when we drove across the USA in June 1977.

Iron John is his most controversial book.

I actually really liked the fragment you gave from “Words Rising,”

Fierceness enters me, stars
Begin to revolve, and pick up
Alligator dust from under the ocean.
Writing and writing, I feel the bushy
Tail of the Great Bear
Reach down and brush the seafloor.

This illustrates to me how Bly loves the stars. Alligator dust under the ocean suggests the age of the dinosaurs, a time within the last two hundred million years, but still within the most recent of earth's 18 orbits around the galaxy since life began. Picking up this dust indicates the connection between different ages, and our continuity with life of millions of years ago. The tail of the bear is a reference to the stars of the north celestial pole, which is now in the little bear but 3000 years ago was in the dragon. Brushing the sea floor references the Hindu myth of the churning of the Milky Sea, an ancient story encoding knowledge of precession of the equinox as the vast slow star clock of the world.
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