Robert Bly – författare

Tomas Tranströmer och Robert Bly har varit vänner länge och det har varit en djup och varm vänskap. De lärde känna varandra på sextiotalet, och den första delen av brevväxlingen utspelar sig mot en mörk fond: Vietnamkriget pågår, det litterära klimatet i Sverige hårdnar gradvis. De båda författarna blir tidigt varandras viktigaste översättare, med en intuitiv ömsesidig förståelse, de uppmuntrar, tröstar och inspirerar varandra. Genom breven kan vi följa växelspelet mellan två närbesläktade och samtidigt olikartade personligheter.   I Tranströmers författarskap kommer breven att inta en väsentlig plats: en hel bok på prosa där poeten framträder som flödande spontan brevskrivare med en humor som ömsom är drastisk, ömsom subtil. I breven hör vi hans röst; en omisskännligt personlig, vardaglig och snillrik röst som kommer att beröra läsare länge efter det att andra författares verk från samma tid fallit i glömska.

Torbjörn Schmidt, som sammanställt brevvolymen, har under många år varit redaktör för Lyrikvännen.

One of our most acclaimed poets brings the work of the great Persian mystic and poet, Hafez, to a new audience. There is no poet in our tradition who carries the amount of admiration and devotion that the Persians have for Hafez. Children learn to sing Hafez poems in the third grade, and almost every family has a copy of the collected Hafez on the dining room table. Robert Bly and the great Islamic scholar Leonard Lewisohn have worked for 15 years on this book of Hafez, the first that carries into English his nimbleness, his outrageous humor, his defenses of the private life in the face of the fundamentalists, and the joy of his love poems. He writes in the ghazal form, one of the greatest inventions in the history of poetry.This is Rumi’s wild younger brother, now brought into an English that makes his genius visible.

Robert Bly, renowned poet and author of the ground-breaking bestseller Iron John, mingles essay and verse to explore the Shadow -- the dark side of the human personality -- and the importance of confronting it.

Robert Bly has always been amazingly prescient in his choice of poets to translate. The poetry he chose supplied qualities that were lacking from the literary culture of this country. For the first time Robert Bly’s brilliant translations, from several languages, have been brought together in one book. Here, in The Winged Energy of Delight, the poems of twenty-two poets, some renowned, others lesser known, are brought together.

At a time when editors and readers knew only Eliot and Pound, Robert Bly introduced the earthy wildness of Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo and the sober grief of Trakl, as well as the elegance of Jiménez and Tranströmer. He also published high-spirited versions of Kabir and Rumi, and Mirabai, which had considerable influence on the wide culture of the 1970s and 1980s. Bly’s clear translations of Rilke attracted many new readers to the poet, and his versions of Machado have become models of silence and depth. He continues to bring fresh and amazing poets into English, most recently Rolf Jacobsen, Miguel Hernandez, Francis Ponge, and the ninteenth-century Indian poet Ghalib. As Kenneth Rexroth has said, Robert Bly “is one of the leaders of a poetic revival which has returned American literature to the world community.”

"Bly''s imaginative prose poems radiate witty delight." —Library Journal

A brilliant collection spanning half a century, from one of America''s most prominent and powerful poets

Robert Bly has had many roles in his illustrious career. He is a chronicler and mentor of young poets, was a leader of the antiwar movement, founded the men''s movement, and wrote the bestselling book Iron John, which brought the men''s movement to the attention of the world. Throughout these activities, Bly has continued to deepen his own poetry, a vigorous voice in a period of more academic wordsmiths. Here he presents his favorite poems of the last decades-timeless classics from Silence in the Snowy Fields, The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and Loving a Woman in Two Worlds. A complete section of marvelous new poems rounds out this collection, which offers a chance to reread, in a fresh setting, a lifetime of work dedicated to fresh perspectives. 

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.

Robert Bly is writing the best poems of his life, and this book reestablishes his 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.

Robert Bly''s new collection of poetry is made of forty-eight poems written in the intricate form called the ghazal, which is the central poetic form in Islam. The influence of Hafez and Rumi is clear, and yet the poems descend into the wealth of Western history, referring at times to Monet, Giordano Bruno,Emerson, St. Francis, Newton, and Chekhov, as well as to events in Bly''s own life. The leaping between joy and "ruin" produces a poetry which makes him, as Kenneth Rexroth noted, "one of the leaders in a poetic revival which has returned American literature to the world community."