Customer Reviews

What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?

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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.