[There] was a radical shift between [Robert Bly's] first and second books, Silence in the Snowy Fields and The Light Around the Body. Since then, however, Bly has not put aside one style or mode to take up another, as some other poets have tended to do. Rather, he has taken the discoveries made in the first two books and used them to write different sorts of poems simultaneously, and has mingled the ways of writing explored there in new ways. The result has been a fascinating body of work, a voice as distinctive as any we now have in our poetry. (p. 2)

A quietly revolutionary book, [Silence in the Snowy Fields] has had an important influence in American poetry in the years since [it appeared]. The snow, fields, barns, lakes, and trees, presented so plainly and precisely, yet seeming to resonate, to glow, with some deep, moving...