Morning Poems

Robert Bly's new work creates a sort of poem full of humor that readers have never seen from him before. Often personal and autobiographical, the poems in this collection include meditations on the art of poetry ("Rereading Silence in the Snowy Fields"), on Bly's boyhood on a Minnesota farm ("What the Animals Paid"), on myths and stories that shape our mutual world ("We're All in This Story"), as well as a sequence of poems on Wallace Stevens and meditations on aging and facing death. Written in the discipline of a poem each day, the poems have some of the freshness of morning in them. The Morning Poems is Bly at his best, an important reminder of why he is one of America's most widely read and intensely admired poets. Excerpt from "Loving God in the Kitchen Pans": A lamp pours light into the room, and it is your Room, as you write poems there. You never Tire of the curving lines, and the freedom of the sounds, And the demons peering around the molding.