Like the New Moon I Will Live My Life
AUTHOR
Robert Bly
TRANSLATORS
Dennis Maloney, Thomas Smith
A luminous collection celebrating National Book Award winner Robert Bly's Chinese-influenced poetry—work characterized by movement, spontaneity, and openness. Gathering over 150 poems from out-of-print books, chapbooks, and uncollected work spanning fifty years (Thereadingwarehouse), these poems find beauty in overlooked details of daily life. Bly changed the course of American poetry by opening it to imagination and reintegrating poetry with daily life, the life of the body, and spiritual life (Thereadingwarehouse).
Reviews
"The most recent in a line of great American transcendentalist writers."
— The New York Times
Thomas R. Smith is an internationally published poet, essayist, editor, and teacher living in western Wisconsin. He worked as Robert Bly’s personal assistant from 1990 until the time of Bly’s death in 2022. He has edited three earlier books on Bly’s work, Walking Swiftly, Robert Bly in This World (with James P. Lenfestey), and Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer. His ten poetry collections include, most recently, Windy Day at Kabekona: New and Selected Prose Poems, Storm Island, and Medicine Year. He has also published a prose work, Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival. He teaches at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and posts poems and essays at www.thomasrsmithpoet.com.
Dennis Maloney is a poet and translator. A number of volumes of his own poetry have been published including The Map Is Not the Territory: Poems & Translations and Just Enough, and Listening to Tao Yuan Ming. A bilingual German/English volume, Empty Cup was published in Germany in 2017. Recent collections include The Things I Notice Now and The Faces of Guan Yin. His poems have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Robert Bly (1926 - 2021) had a profound impact on the shape of American poetry. He is the author of more than thirty books of poetry and essays. As the editor of the magazine The Sixties (begun as The Fifties), Bly introduced many unknown European and South American poets to an American audience. His honors include Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships as well as The Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. His recent books include Like the New Moon I Will Live My Life, Looking for Dragon Smoke and Collected Poems.