Publication Date: May 1, 2004
50 Pages, perfectbound
Price: $10.00 + 2.00 Shipping and Handling
In this collection of new and selected poems Robert Bly offers a group of work that address the issues inherent in America’s wars. Also included is a prose section called "Intuitions and Ideas" in which Bly directly discusses the administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq. He brings in six poems from The Light Around the Body, his book about the Vietnam War, which won the National Book Award, including the poem that opens "Merchants have multiplied more than the stars of heaven." We can still feel the relevance of that image, that urges us to look at the secret demands of a capitalist society.
He contributes to this book a new group of poems discussing the power of the greedy soul or "the rapacious soul." In them he surmises that the greedy longing for 95 TV channels is related to the greedy longing for a new war. He notices Whitman’s awareness of such covetousness as it appeared in the business world after the Civil War, and he quotes Whitman’s line, "Let sympathy pass, a stranger, to other shores."
The last section includes five new poems in the ghazal form, a form that contributed to the power of his book The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, published by HarperCollins in 2001. These poems include the now-famous poem "Call and Answer," which was one of the first poems written against the war, published in The Nation in August of 2002. Bly’s new poems reach for that larger voice to which he has always been committed.