The 25th anniversary edition of the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller, with a new afterword by the author--which offers a new vision of what it is to be a manIn this timeless and deeply learned classic, poet and translator Robert Bly offers nothing less than a new vision of what it means to be a man.Bly's vision is based on his ongoing work with men, as well as on reflections on his own life. He addresses the devastating effects of remote fa...

Antonio Machado, a school teacher and philosopher and one of Spain's foremost poets of the twentieth century, writes of the mountains, the skies, the farms and the sentiments of his homeland clearly and without narcissism: "Just as before, I'm interested/in water held in;/ but now water in the living/rock of my chest." "Machado has vowed not to soar too much; he wants to 'go down to the hells' or stick to the ordinary," Robert Bly writes in his introduction. He brings to the ordinary—to ti...

Robert Bly, renowned poet and author of the ground-breaking bestseller Iron John, mingles essay and verse in this profound work of mythology and Jungian psychology to explore the Shadow—the dark side of the human personality—and the importance of this inner work in confronting it.What happens when we ignore the parts of ourselves we’ve locked away?The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us: Discover Bly’s famous metaphor for the represse...

Striking and moving poems that are rooted deep in the earthThe poems of Robert Bly are rooted deep in the earth. Snow and sunshine, barns and cornfields and cars on the empty nighttime roads, abandoned Minnesota lakes and the mood of America now—these are his materials. He sees and talks clearly: he uses no rhetoric nor mannered striving for effect, but instead the simple statement that in nine lines can embody a mood, reveal a profound truth, illuminate in an impo...

“[Robert Bly] is . . . the most recent in a line of great American transcendentalist writers.”—New York TimesSelected from throughout Robert Bly’s monumental body of work from 1950 through the present, Stealing Sugar from the Castle represents the culmination of an astonishing career in American letters.Bly has long been the voice of transcendentalism and meditative mysticism for his generation. Influenced by Emerson and Thoreau, inspired ...

Mirabai is a literary and spiritual figure of legendary proportions. Born a princess in the region of Rajasthan in 1498, Mira (as she is more commonly known) eschewed the marriage her royal family had arranged for her, celebrating instead her right to independence and intense devotion to Krishna in both her life and poetry. In this collection, Robert Bly and Jane Hirshfield, two of America's best poets, have created lively English versions of Mirabai's poems, using fresh images and energet...

Acclaimed poet and translator Robert Bly here assembles a unique cross–cultural anthology that illuminates the idea of a larger–than–human consciousness operating in the universe. The book's 150 poems come from around the world and many eras: from the ecstatic Sufi poet Rumi to contemporary voices like Kenneth Rexroth, Denise Levertov, Charles Simic, and Mary Oliver. Brilliant introductory essays trace our shifting attitudes toward the natural world, from the "old position" of dominating o...

Gathering more than sixty years of poetry, Collected Poems showcases the brilliant career of a "great American transcendentalist" (New York Times).An extraordinary culmination for Robert Bly’s lifelong intellectual adventure, Collected Poems presents the full magnitude of his body of work for the first time. Bly has long been the voice of transcendentalism and meditative mysticism for his generation; every stage of his work is warmed by h...

Leaping Poetry is Robert Bly's testament to the singular importance of the artistic leap that bridges the gap between conscious and unconscious thought in any great work of art; the process that Bly refers to as "riding on dragons." Originally published in 1972 in Bly's literary journal The Seventies, Leaping Poetry is part anthology and part commentary, wherein Bly seeks to rejuvenate modern Western poetry through his revelations of "leaping" as found in the works of poe...

The poems of Robert Bly are rooted deep in the earth. Snow and sunshine, barns and cornfields and cars on the empty nighttime roads, abandoned Minnesota lakes and the mood of America now—these are his materials. He sees and talks clearly: he uses no rhetoric nor mannered striving for effect, but instead the simple statement that in nine lines can embody a mood, reveal a profound truth, illuminate in an important way the inward and hidden life. This is a poet of the modern world, thoroughly...

From the Winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in LiteratureThe contemporary Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer is a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature and has a prestigious worldwide reputation. Robert Bly, a longtime friend and confidant of Tranströmer's, as well as one of his first translators, has carefully chosen and translated the finest of Tranströmer's poems to create this cherished and invaluable collection.ContentsIntroductio...

The illuminating letters of the National Book Award winning poet Robert Bly and the Nobel Prize winning poet Tomas TranströmerOne day in spring 1964, the young American poet Robert Bly left his rural farmhouse and drove 150 miles to the University of Minnesota library in Minneapolis to obtain the latest book by the young Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. When Bly returned home that evening with a copy of Tranströmer's The Half-Finished Heaven, he found a let...