My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy
Poems
-
- $6.99
-
- $6.99
Publisher Description
Readers have found Robert Bly’s ghazals startling and new; they merge wildness with a beautiful formality. The ghazal form is well-known in Islamic culture, but only now finding its way into the literary culture of the West. Each stanza of three lines amounts to a finished poem. “God crouches at night over a single pistachio. / The vastness of the Wind River Range in Wyoming / Has no more grandeur than the waist of a child.”
The ghazal’s compacted energy is astounding. In a period when much American poetry is retreating into prosaic recordings of daily events, these poems do the opposite. My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy is Robert Bly’s second book of ghazals. The poems have become more intricate and personal than they were in The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, and the leaps even more bold. This book includes the already famous poem against the Iraq War, “Call and Answer”: “Tell me why it is we don¹t lift our voices these days / And cry over what is happening.” The poems are intimate and yet reach out toward the world: the paintings of Robert Motherwell, the intensity of Flamenco singers, the sadness of the gnostics, the delight of high spirits and wit.
This book reestablishes Bly's position as one of the greatest poets of our era. After many years of free verse in American poetry, years which have been very fertile, the inventive ghazal helps the imagination to luxuriate in a form once more. We are seeing a poetry emerge that is recovering many of the great intensities that modern art and poetry has aimed at and achieved in earlier generations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bly's first book of verse since last year's The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations is also his second collection of what he calls ghazals: unrhymed, intensely wrought 18-line pentameter poems based on the Urdu form of that name. Bly's ghazals let him leap from topic to topic, showcasing exclamations and single images: "We are the sparrow that flies through the warrior's/ Hall and back out into the falling snow," he announces in "Brahms," one of many poems that aim "to praise all the great musicians." (Haydn, Rameau and the virtuosi of sitar and tabla get tributes, as do biblical characters.) Many stanzas pivot on Bly's speech to himself ("Robert, you're close to joy but not quite there"); always Bly strives for passionate wisdom. The results, when pushed through Bly's more Iron John like persona, sometimes end up self-helpy: "A pain that we have earned gives more nourishment/ Than the joy we won at the lottery last night." Some readers may find individual lines impressive, but the book as a whole ends up being less than the sum of its joyous parts. Readers who miss the direct, daring Bly of the '60s, though, may rejoice to find that he's back, in force.