Morning poems

Aware that poetry can appeal to the child in us, poet (Meditations on the Insatiable Soul, LJ 10/15/94), social critic (The Sibling Society, LJ 7/96), and men's advocate (Iron John, LJ 4/1/92) Bly adopts the homely diction and personification of children's fiction to create a storybook world filled with wry humor and quirky, surreal leaps. Mice converse, oceans complain, and less-than-sage observations are delivered with a deadpan naïveté: "Getting killed/ Happens during a war a lot to horses and people." Even titles‘"Bad People," "Things To Think"‘seem lifted from a first-grade primer. But behind the affected innocence lies a desire to subvert expectations by playing style against substance to spotlight and praise the role of surprise in our lives ("We bend our ankle and end up reading Gibbon"). Cloaked in the simplicity of folktales told around a campfire, Bly's allegories of aging, death, and loss forfeit their intrinsic terrors to the larger, absorptive patterns of myth. It's a risky strategy, one open to charges of coyness and condescension toward the reader; but when it works, the results are entertaining, poignant, and‘like each new day‘unpredictable.‘Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Morning Poems Early Morning in Your Room It's morning. The brown scoops of coffee, the wasplike Coffee grinder, the neighbors still asleep. The gray light as you pour gleaming water-- It seems you've travelled years to get here. Finally you deserve a house. If not deserve It, have it; no one can get you out. Misery Had its way, poverty, no money at least; Or maybe it was confusion. But that's over. Now you have a room. Those light-hearted books: The Anatomy of Melancholy, Kafka's Letter To His Father, are all here. You can dance with only one leg, and see the snowflake falling With only one eye. Even the blind man Can see. That's what they say. If you had A sad childhood, so what? When Robert Burton Said he was melancholy, he meant he was home. Morning Poems . Copyright © by Robert Bly. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Morning Poems by Robert Bly All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.