Images Plunging Inward

...Associate Professor of English, Queens College In a recent issue of the American Poetry Review Robert Bly quotes approvingly Vallejo's words that "What is important in a poem, as in life, is the tone with which a thing is said, and very secondarily, what is said...

...Bly suffers the nightmare of the living, the presence of the Teeth Mother in the body politic...

...Yet, of the significant American poets writing today, Bly is among the few whose "what is said" actually matters...

...His call for more inwardness is equally a call for greater political awareness...

...The long poem that gives the collection its title takes the poet through the dream and the nightmare, ultimately to the union of all the sleepers in the world who join hands...

...hard drugs that leave the boy-man permanently 'stoned' are among the weapons of this Mother...

...Bly's surreal images are the instruments of that plunge inward, his means-as they are the means of Latin American poets with whom Bly is so strongly allied-to make the inner and outer worlds mingle...

...The poet is not angry, because he sees the desire as inevitable...

...The Teeth Mother Naked At Last," the most important poem in the book, contrasts our rich country and its automatic weapons, its "new packaging for smoked oysters," its cigarette lighters, its expensive hospital rooms with the reed huts and rice paddies of the Vietnamese, with their children whom we have set on fire...

...this is what happens when death, the Teeth Mother, is dominant...

...When "ministers lie, the professors lie, the television lies, the priests lie," he says, "these lies are only the longings we all feel to die...

...He believes intensely that "there are places for our feet to go...

...My Lai is partway down...

...The war came about, Bly tells us, through our "desire to eat death"-but this is no metaphysical yearning, no bizarre phenomenon that makes us want to take death and "gobble it down, . . . rush on it like a cobra with mouth open...

...America's fate is to face this Mother before other industrial nations...

...In a fascinating prose section that draws on Jung and Erich Neumann's ideas of matriarchy, Bly writes: She "stands for numbness, paralysis, catatonia, being totally spaced out, the psyche torn to bits, arms and legs thrown all over...

...As it was in the preceding National Book Award collection, The Light Around the Body, the Vietnam catastrophe is the dominant fact in the present volume...

...Poe's 'Descent into the Maelstrom' suggests the horror of the descent...

...If we could only not be eaten by the steep teeth," Bly writes in "Tao Ching Running," a short poem that I think is the finest in the volume, "then we would find holy books in our bed...

...Because we do not allow "the fragments in the unconscious" to "grow big as the beams in hunting lodges," we lie and make war, and the sophisticated engines our technology produces burn "a thousand gallons of gasoline a minute [that] sweep over the huts with dirt floors...

...The poem begins with the plea: "I don't want to wake up in the weeds, and find the light/gone out in the body, and the cells dark...

...finally, as a poet, he can always "fly into one of my own poems" and, as a mystic, he knows "the darkness appears as flakes of light...

...Although he is becoming increasingly mythopoeic and psychic, his meaning is essentially political and, like Blake, his vision of self is coextensive with his vision of the body politic...

...In the end, the shadow goes away, death is friendly, and "all the sleepers in the world join hands...

...We are ruled by death-the Teeth Mother, also called the Stone Mother, who is the book's mythic force...