SOURCE: Dacey, Philip. “This Book Is Made of Turkey Soup and Star Music.” Parnassus 7, no. 1 (fall-winter 1978): 34-45.

In the following review, Dacey characterizes This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood as “a book of deep religious longings,” concentrating on the various qualities of Bly's poetic persona that surface in these prose-poems. The critic concludes with a comment on the fourteen short poems of Bly's collection The Loon, which demonstrate the reserved side of the poet.

William Morris, according to Yeats, once said that “somebody should have been beside Carlyle and punched his head every five minutes.” Surely the same can be said of Robert Bly, provided the frequency is increased. The following true story illustrates the frustrating vagaries of trying to come to terms with his work: six young writers are riding home from a Bly reading in New York; all but one are eulogizing it with...