loving a woman

This small paperback book of poetry was given to me by my wife more than 20 years ago. She marked the poems she wanted me to read in particular with small bookmarks, which are still in my copy. This time around, I read through the whole collection. Its only 75 pages or so. It didn't take long. Many of Robert Bly's poems are short; just a stanza or two.

I'm not sure I'm smart enough to know what two worlds Bly speaks of when he talks about Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, but if I had to guess, I'd say they are the modern world, and the natural world, and as you can imagine, sometimes the two overlap. Often, Bly speaks of love, and sex, and caring through the anthropomorphism of animals and natural objects. And the subject matter seems to often stray to himself and his wife, with whom it appears, he has had a long, but sometimes rocky relationship, which seems always to return to love.

Bly's poems are sparse, subtle, evocative, and tinged with rawness of feeling, and underlain with animal lust in all its natural glory. Bly lays it all out there in his poems, and their honesty is compelling. The language is both simple, and complex: the vocabulary is very accessible--Bly isn't digging through the thesaurus for just the right word--but the meanings, how the words are used, seems to slip and shift as I read.

It was a lot of fun to come back to this one, and relive the feelings I had when I first read these poems, as I also looked at them, and my relationship with my wife, with the perspective of the intervening years.

Read this book.