The great Persian poet Hafez is so beloved in Iran that almost every family there keeps his "Divan" close at hand. For some fifteen years, esteemed American poet and author Robert Bly has worked with the great Islamic scholar Leonard Lewisohn to produce this translation, which for the first time captures Hafez's nimbleness, his fierce humor, his astonishing range of thought, and his delight in love--enabling English speakers to fully appreciate the true genius of this master of the "ghazal" form, one of the greatest inventions in the history of poetry.

Robert Bly's new collection of poetry is made of forty-eight poems written in the intricate form called the ghazal, which is the central poetic form in Islam. The influence of Hafez and Rumi is clear, and yet the poems descend into the wealth of Western history, referring at times to Monet, Giordano Bruno,Emerson, St. Francis, Newton, and Chekhov, as well as to events in Bly's own life. The leaping between joy and "ruin" produces a poetry which makes him, as Kenneth Rexroth noted, "one of the leaders in a poetic revival which has returned American literature to the world community."

Readers have found Robert Bly's ghazals startling and new; they merge wildness with a beautiful formality.

"My Sentence Was a Thousand Years" of Joy is Robert Bly's second book of ghazals. The poems have become more intricate and personal than they were in "The Night Abraham Called to the Stars," and the leaps even bolder. This book includes the already famous poem against the Iraq War, "Call and Answer": "Tell me why it is we don't lift our voices these days / And cry over what is happening."

The poems are intimate and yet reach out toward the world: the paintings of Robert Motherwell, the intensity of flamenco singers, the sadness of the gnostics, the delight of high spirits and wit. Robert Bly is writing the best poems of his life, and this book reestablishes his position as one of the greatest poets of our era.

Reveals myth and "otherness" as keys to restoring self, nature, and society * Shows how myths contain medicine to restore wholeness amidst trauma, exile, sudden life change, disability, illness, death, or grief * Synthesizes lessons from shamanic practice, quantum physics, alchemy, soul poetry, wildness, social justice, and the author's lived experience * Discloses the blessings of outsiderhood and the gifts and insights gained and contributed to culture by those who are marginalized and outcast There is an "other" that lives within each of us, an exiled part that carries wisdom needed for ourselves and the culture at large. Having survived disabling polio as an infant, Daniel Deardorff knows the oppressions of exclusion and outsiderhood. He guides readers on an initiatory journey through ancient myth, literature, and personal revelation to discover our own true identity. These 10,000-year-old stories contain sacred medicine with insights that release imagination and restore wholeness amid trauma, exile, climate chaos, disability, illness, death, and grief. Illustrating how archetypal figures of the Other--the Trickster, Daimon, Not-I, etc.--hold paradox, Deardorff teaches us to reframe disparities of self/other, civilization/ wilderness, form/deformity and transform the experience of being outcast. Synthesizing lessons from shamanic practice, quantum physics, alchemy, social justice, and his own lived experience, Deardorff affirms the disruptive and transgressive forces that break through dogma, conventionality, and prejudice. He discloses blessings of outsiderhood and gifts to culture by those who are marginalized. Through mythmaking (mythopoesis), the experience of Otherness--cultural, racial, religious, sexual, physiognomic--becomes one of empowerment, a catalyst for human liberation.

In this timeless and deeply learned classic, poet and translator Robert Bly offers nothing less than a new vision of what it means to be a man. Bly's vision is based on his ongoing work with men, as well as on reflections on his own life. He addresses the devastating effects of remote fathers and mourns the disappearance of male initiation rites in our culture. Finding rich meaning in ancient stories and legends, Bly uses the Grimm fairy tale "Iron John",in which a mentor or "Wild Man" guides a young man through eight stages of male growth,to remind us of ways of knowing long forgotten, images of deep and vigorous masculinity centreed in feeling and protective of the young. At once down-to-earth and elevated, combining the grandeur of myth with the practical and often painful lessons of our own histories, Iron John is an astonishing work that will continue to guide and inspire men,and women,for years to come.

Robert Bly, renowned poet and author of the ground-breaking bestseller Iron John, mingles essay and verse to explore the Shadow -- the dark side of the human personality -- and the importance of confronting it.

Acclaimed poet and translator Robert Bly here assembles a unique cross-cultural anthology that illuminates the idea of a larger-than-human consciousness operating in the universe. The book's 150 poems come from around the world and many eras: from the ecstatic Sufi poet Rumi to contemporary voices like Kenneth Rexroth, Denise Levertov, Charles Simic, and Mary Oliver. Brilliant introductory essays trace our shifting attitudes toward the natural world, from the  old position" of dominating or denigrating nature, to the growing sympathy expressed by the Romantics and American poets like Whitman and Dickinson. Bly's translations of Neruda, Rilke, and others, along with superb examples of non-Western verse such as Eskimo and Zuni songs, complete this important, provocative anthology.

Robert Bly, James Hillman, and Michael Meade challenge the assumptions of our poetry-deprived society in this powerful collection of more than 400 deeply moving poems from renowned artists including Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Theodore Roethke, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marianne Moore, Thomas Wolfe, Czeslaw Milosz, and Henry David Thoreau.

Like Coleman Barks's translations of Rumi, this collection of poems by Mirabai will appeal to anyone interested in spiritual poetry. Translator and renowned poet Robert Bly has teamed up with Jane Hirshfield, a leader in the field of feminine spiritual poetry, to bring us a passionate and inspiring collection of the ecstatic poems of a figure of legendary proportions.Born in India in 1498, Mirabai celebrated both the body and the spirit in her work. By her death in 1550 she was a well-known and well-loved poet throughout her country. Now, Bly and Hirshfield brilliantly translate this sage's work, so full of drama, passion, and yearning.

"The most recent in a line of great American transcendentalist writers."--The New York Times "Bly's poems flow from ...the great current of longing for reality, true maturity, the devotee's call to the Beloved."--The Nation "Robert Bly changed the course of poetry in America by opening it up to the imagination and the deep-image aesthetic, he is dedicated to reintegrating poetry with life--daily life, the life of the body, spiritual and political life."--Huffington Post The Chinese-influenced strain of Bly's work with its room for movement, spontaneity, and openness is celebrated in Like the New Moon I Will Live My Life and most amply showcased in its over one hundred and fifty poems. The poems, collected from out-of-print books, chapbooks, and uncollected work spanning fifty years, form a companion to his recent Stealing Sugar From The Castle: New and Selected Poems. Like The New Moon I Will Live My Life When your privacy is beginning over, How beautiful the things are that you did not notice before! A few sweetclover plants Along the road to Bellingham, Culvert ends poking out of driveways, Wooden corncribs, slowly falling, What no one loves, no one rushes towards or shouts about, What lives like the new moon, And the wind Blowing against the rumps of grazing cows. Telephone wires stretched across water, A drowning sailor standing at the foot of his mother's bed, Grandfathers and grandsons sitting together. Robert Bly is one of the most influencial poets, translators, and editors of his generation.

"An unusual, exciting volume which serves ideally to lead readers into the extraordinary creative world of three Minnesota poets who are familiar with the contemporary poetry of several nations and who together are bringing to American poetry a powerful new direction away from academicism. Poetry which experiments with content rather than with form and whose life does not depend upon the metrics but upon the life of the poet himself. "--John Logan This is a facsimile edition of the original Sixties Press book issued in 1962 and contains some of Robert Bly's and James Wright's iconic poems.

The illuminating letters of the National Book Award winning poet Robert Bly and the Nobel Prize winning poet Tomas Transtromer

One day in spring 1964, the young American poet Robert Bly left his rural farmhouse and drove 150 miles to the University of Minnesota library in Minneapolis to obtain the latest book by the young Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer. When Bly returned home that evening with a copy of Transtromer's "The Half-Finished Heaven," he found a letter waiting for him from its author.
With this remarkable coincidence as its beginning, what followed was a vibrant correspondence between two poets who would become essential contributors to global literature. "Airmail" collects more than 290 letters, written from 1964 until 1990, when Transtromer suffered a stroke that has left him partially paralyzed and diminished his capacity to write.
Across their correspondence, the two poets are profoundly engaged with each other and with the larger world: the Vietnam War, European and American elections, and the struggles of affording a life as a writer. "Airmail" also illuminates the work of translation as Bly began to render Transtromer's poetry into English and Transtromer began to translate Bly's poetry into Swedish. Their collaboration quickly turned into a friendship that has lasted fifty years.
Insightful, brilliant, and often funny, "Airmail" provides a rare portrait of two artists who have become integral to each other's particular genius. This publication marks the first time letters by Bly and Transtromer have been made available in the United States.

Robert Bly writes that it is clear to men that the images of adult manhood given by popular culture are worn out, that a man can no longer depend on them. Iron John searches for a new vision of what a man is or could be, drawing on psychology, anthropology, mythology, folklore and legend. Robert Bly looks at the importance of the Wild Man (reminiscent of the Wild Woman in Women Who Run With the Wolves), who he compares to a Zen priest, a shaman or a woodman. 'This book needs to be read, I believe, not as a dry work of scholarship to be judged coolly by the mind, but as the work of a poet struggling to convey an emotional experience and lead us to what he has found within himself' Guardian 'Eclectic and unclassifiable. Iron John is a work whose mentors are the prophetic poets and crazies, William Blake and Walt Whitman' Sydney Morning Herald 'Important.timely.and powerful' New York Times

Joyous, inspired meditations that demonstrate Bly's talent for conveying in the simplest language the richness and complexity of the universe around us.--Library Journal Available for the first time, this significant volume collects over one hundred of Robert Bly's prose poems written over a period of five decades. It includes the bulk of several landmark out-of-print volumes as well as uncollected poems and new material. Bly has been one of the leading writers of the prose poem since the reemergence of the form in the 1960s. Robert Bly is one of the leading poets of his generation.

One day in spring 1964, the young American poet Robert Bly left his rural farmhouse and drove 150 miles to the University of Minnesota library in Minneapolis to obtain the latest book by the young Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer. When Bly returned home that evening with a copy of Transtromer's The Half-Finished Heaven, he found a letter waiting for him from its author. With this remarkable coincidence as its beginning, what followed was a vibrant correspondence between two poets who would become essential contributors to global literature. Airmail collects more than 290 letters, written from 1964 until 1990, when Transtromer suffered a stroke that has left him partially paralysed and diminished his capacity to write. Across their correspondence, the two poets are profoundly engaged with each other and with the larger world: the Vietnam War, European and American elections, and the struggles of affording a life as a writer. Airmail also offers remarkable insights into the processes of translating literature from one language into another. As Bly began to render Transtromer's poetry into English and Transtromer began to translate Bly's poetry into Swedish, their collaboration soon turned into a friendship that has lasted fifty years. Insightful, brilliant, and often funny, Airmail provides a rare portrait of two artists who have become integral to each other's particular genius. Based on the original Swedish edition published in 2001, this publication marks the first time letters by Transtromer and Bly have been made available in Britain. Robert Bly's translations of Tomas Transtromer appear in The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Transtromer, published by Graywolf Press. Transtromer's complete poetry is available in English in Robin Fulton's translation, New Collected Poems, published by Bloodaxe Books (and by New Directions in the US under the title The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems).

A true classic of modern literature that has been described as "one of the most disturbing novels in existence" ("Time Out"), Hunger is the story of a Norwegian artist who wanders the streets, struggling on the edge of starvation. As hunger overtakes him, he slides inexorably into paranoia and despair. The descent into madness is recounted by the unnamed narrator in increasingly urgent and disjointed prose, as he loses his grip on reality.

The Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry in 1972 has been in print for over 35 years. This is a new edition of this multi-prize winning book issued to coincide with publisher Wesleyan Univesity Press' fiftieth anniversary. Indexed.

Robert Bly's ground-breaking anthology of spiritual poems, the result of over a decade of personal research, celebrates the ongoing role of the divine in literature. For as long as people have lived together in communities and built enduring cultures, they have sung and written about their relationship with the God or gods they believed in. In the words of the Irish writer Sean O'Faolain, "all good writing in the end is the writer's argument with God."

The Soul Is Here For Its Own Joy gathers poems from a wide range of cultures and traditions and divides them into ten parts, each forming a resonant exploration of a specific and timeless spiritual question. Selections include the work of Dante, Dogen, Goethe, Hafez, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Kabir, Lalla, Li Po, Mirabai, Mary Oliver, Owl Woman, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Rumi, in addition to Blake, Dickinson, Donne, Hopkins, Stevens, Yeats, and other important English and American poets. Together these poems form both a celebration and a quest--a kind of pilgrim's progress that embraces all the rich wisdom of East and West, ancient and modern, male and female, spirit and flesh.

Originally published in 1976, with more than 75,000 copies in print, this collection of poems by fifteenth-century ecstatic poet Kabir is full of fun and full of thought. Columbia University professor of religion John Stratton Hawley has contributed an introduction that makes clear Kabir's immense importance to the contemporary reader and praises Bly's intuitive translations.
By making every reader consider anew their religious thinking, the poems of Kabir seem as relevant today as when they were first written.
"Robert Bly earns the thanks of us all. I, for one, will reread [Bly's Kabir] often." --Paul Carroll, American Poetry Review
"Kabir's poems give off a marvelous radiant intensity that never fails . . . they have exactly the luminous depth that permits and invites many rereadings." --Hayden Carruth, New York Times Book Review
"Without Bly, modern American poetry would be unrecognizable in its current form. Without his poems, his translations, and his devotion to poetry, American literature would have taken a different turn in its rich and influential history." --Ray Gonzalez, The Bloomsbury Review
Robert Bly has earned many honors for his original poems, which include The Winged Energy of Delight, and for his translations of twenty-two poets, including Kabir. He is the author of the bestseller Iron John, and with Jane Hirshfield has published a new translation of Mirabai (Beacon / 6386-6 / $16.00).

Norway's Rolf Jacobsen is one of Europe's most acclaimed writers yet, as Robert Bly points out in his introduction: "This magnificent poet is so little known in the United States." This bilingual edition, which selects the best work from Jacobsen's ten volumes, will help remedy that situation.

Three dedicated translators contribute to this book. Robert Bly's translations celebrate the radiance with which Jacobsen praised the complex beauty of the Earth; Robert Hedin focuses on the countryside, creature, and star poems; and Roger Greenwald draws difficult emotions from Jacobsen's charged last poems, composed while his wife struggled with fatal illness--as when he remembers their bitter-cold wedding day during World War II:

Road to the church was blocked with barbed wire.
I remember we clambered over the rail fence of the parsonage.
--Hey, your dress is caught
--no, not there--over there.
We tramped the furrows of an ice-crusted
potato field, up to the minister
who was in his surplice and had
the Scriptures ready.
--Love is a "path" you must walk, he says. Yes, we said.
But my lord what muddy feet we had
When we got in bed that night
we cried a dab--both of us. God
knows why.
And then the long life began.

Rolf Jacobsen was born in 1907 and lived his adult life north of Oslo. He worked as a journalist and newspaper editor and played a critical role in introducing modernism to Norwegian poetry. His poetry has been translated into nearly thirty languages. A member of the Norwegian Academy of Language and Literature, he was honored with many prizes and awards, including the Norwegian Critics' Prize and the Grand Nordic Prize from the Swedish Academy. Jacobsen died in 1994.

..".spare, psalmlike poems....Together, the poems in this beautifully translated selection...provide us with the autobiography of a poet who felt most at home during winter, in solitude. Hauge deserves a larger American readership, and this book may summon it." --"Publishers Weekly"

"(Hauge's) poetry is miniaturist, pictorial, and ruminative; personal in that his experience, cognitive and sensual observations, and intentions are everywhere in it. Yet it isn't at all confessional or self-assertive....He is a man who knows where he is and helps us feel that we can know where we are, too."--"Booklist "

"If you have a tiny farm, you need to love poetry more than the farm. If you sell apples, you need to love poetry more than the apples."--Robert Bly, from the introduction

Olav H. Hauge, one of Norway's most beloved poets, is a major figure of twentieth-century European poetry. This generous bilingual edition--introduced by Robert Bly--includes the best poems from each of Hauge's seven books, as well as a gathering of his last poems.

Ever sage and plainspoken--and bearing resemblance to Chinese poetry--Hauge's compact and classically restrained poems are rooted in his training as an orchardist, his deep reading in world literatures, and a lifetime of careful attention to the beauties and rigors of the western fjordland. His spare imagery and unpretentious tone ranges from bleak to unabashedly joyous, an intricate interplay between head and heart and hand.

"The rose has been sung about.
I want to sing of the thorns,
and the root--how it grips
the rock hard, hard
as a thin girl's hand."

During a writing career that spanned nearly fifty years, Olav H. Hauge produced seven books of poetry, numerous translations, and several volumes of correspondence. A largely self-educated man, he earned his living as a farmer, orchardist, and gardener on a small plot in the fjord region of western Norway.

The Web has developed its own set of rules and attitudes for writing hard-hitting marketing copy. Robert Blys The Online Copywriters Handbook is the first practical and authoritative guide to what exactly those rules are and how they differ from writing for print audiences. From novices just taking their first copywriting steps to veterans looking to add impact and results to their online efforts, it covers everything from general fundamentals of writing effective copy to specific Web copywriting tips and traps.