WHITE PINE PRESS
an independent literary publisher
The Garden Entrusted to Me: Essays on Poetry & the Writing Life - Robert Bly - edited by Thomas Smith - afterword Jane Hirshfield - $25.00 - ISBN 978-1-945680-85-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2024952166
The Garden Entrusted to Me is a collection of Robert Bly’s essential writings on his life and practice of poetry, revealing his approach to technique and the life experiences that helped form him as a poet.
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The Garden Entrusted to Me gathers into one volume Robert Bly’s essays on the craft of poetry and the writing life. This body of essays, some of them previously unpublished, is scattered across various books and publications, and has never before appeared together in one place. Three autobiographical essays highlight Bly’s origins on the family farm in western Minnesota and his early exposure to poetry as a high school student. Others broadly outline Bly’s approach to the vocation and discipline of poetry. At the center of this collection are a half-dozen pieces that focus on approaches to form and sound in poetry, revealing the originality of Bly’s method and process. The book concludes with the major Paris Review interview summarizing biographical, artistic and philosophical themes of Bly’s life and work as they have appeared throughout this volume, while opening new avenues for further exploration; in that way it mirrors the continual unfolding of Bly’s thought and creativity.
"Robert Bly has become, over his several lifetimes of ink and words, a force of geological genius, transforming the landscape of poetry and culture in ways that set him beside the Old Masters and anonymous teachers whose praises his lines so often sing. This book carries its own lantern of bioluminescence, an alchemical music and knowledge, and Bly's ferocious thirst, needed now more than ever."
— Jane Hirshfield
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.
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.