Robert Bly Critical Essay | Critical Review by Marjorie Perloff

Critical Review by Marjorie Perloff

SOURCE: Perloff, Marjorie. Review of The Man in the Black Coat Turns, by Robert Bly. Parnassus 10, no. 1 (spring-summer 1982): 209-30.

In the following excerpted review of The Man in the Black Coat Turns, Perloff observes the autobiographical and inward-looking qualities of the collection, and comments on Bly's translation of poems by the Chilean Pablo Neruda.

According to the blurb. [of Robert Bly's The Man in the Black Coat Turns],

Robert Bly has been writing the poems in this tenth collection for nearly ten years—the time it has taken to move toward the subject of this book: the nurturing power of grief, especially male grief. A man approaches his father only later in life, Bly believes, and his concentration on fathers and sons is rare in our poetry; the father has been absent in most American poetry, even in Whitman's.

The last statement is hardly accurate: the poetry of...
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