SOURCE: Stitt, Peter. Review of Selected Poems, by Robert Bly. Georgia Review 40 (winter 1986): 1021-26.

In the following review of Selected Poems, Stitt remarks on Bly's poetic journeys through natural, human, and spiritual worlds, his use of daring metaphors, and his allegiance to “the dark, the primitive, the nonrational.”

Robert Bly's Selected Poems is quite different from most such volumes. … Where poets generally include within their selected volume everything that they wish to preserve from earlier books, Bly has pared his corpus down to a slim grouping meant to indicate the major directions he sees his work taking. As though to reinforce this concept, he has written a series of introductions for the sections of the book, a kind of reader's guide to his own work. In one of those little essays, Bly comments on the locus that he wishes to reach: “All poems are journeys. They go from...