PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewAstonishing ... You cannot read Bly’s poetry without appreciating his belief that cultural integration might redeem us all. Nowhere is that more apparent than in his translations of several centuries of European, Middle Eastern and South American poets...You won’t find any translations in Collected Poems, a shame since in those translations there is something more than just an echo of his focus on the nature of a capacious imagination ... How can one read Collected Poems, then, from its first wintry still lifes, whose lyricism is as clean as snow falling onto bare trees, through the grapplings with injustice, to the mannered ghazals of the last decades, without seeing that Bly’s career is one of the few great models of integrating the citizen with the mystic, whose body of work makes the argument that being a poet does not excuse you from joining in the national debate? By my reading his best poems are sketched with earnestness, with reverence to self-authority, and with the subtle and strange forces of myth, where intricate connections of disparate motifs reveal the terrors and charms of the world. In his fashion, he makes metaphors for grace. Compared with that, the big, popular blunderbuss of Bly hardly matters.
