What Have I Ever Lost by Dying? [Hardcover]

Robert Bly (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Bly is a poet, translator, and author of the current best-selling Iron John ( LJ 11/15/90). This collection of prose poems, drawn from work done over the past 30 years, is organized into five sections: "The Point Reyes Poems," "Family Poems," "Object and Creatures Glanced at Briefly," "Love Poems," and "Looking for the Rat's Hole." In "The Dead Seal," Bly praises the seal's whiskers, smooth skin, and slanted eyes as if offering a prayer and asks the seal to "Be comfortable in death" as it had been in the ocean. The poems in "Objects and Creatures Glanced at Briefly" offer a fresh look at an oyster, a potato, a caterpillar, and a grain of rice, among other things. Bly often expresses delight in the delicate fabric of nature, as when he comments on a bird's "balanced, disciplined, airy . . . rows of feathers." These are not melancholy musings but joyous, inspired meditations that demonstrate Bly's talent for conveying in the simplest language the richness and complexity of the universe around us.
- Francis Poole, Univ. of Delaware Lib., Newark
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 90 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins; 1st edition (May 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006016817X
• ISBN-13: 978-0060168179
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #506,245 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars great translator, great anthology editor but ..., June 24, 2001

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: What Have I Ever Lost by Dying? (Hardcover)

I enjoy Bly's translations and anthologies; therefore, I try his poetry ... this time, only to be disappointed. And from his introduction to the early poems, I suspect he detects the same flaw as I. He says "When I composed the first of these poems, ... I hoped that a writer could describe and object or a creature without claiming it, without immersing it like a negative in his developing tank of disappointment and desire. I no longer think that is possible". He later mentions that the style of the object poems is usually spare - that he is unusual in accepting the human fantasy that closes many of his poems.

Despite the warnings, Bly's style in this poems appears inconsistent - he begins in the concrete but quickly dissolves into intellectual images i.e. images that display a highly creative, broadly educated intellect that has gone into itself rather than staying in the concrete moment that began the poem. The result is a poem in which the poet seems centered neither in the poem nor the object of the poem but rather in his own mind.

There are some wonderful images, some superb turns of phrase, some excellent reinterpretations of unlikely topics (see his take on hockey) but the poems as a whole remain unsatisfying.