The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: A Poetry Anthology - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060924209 ISBN 13: 9780060924201

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 1993

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert Bly's books of poetry include The Night Abraham Called to the Stars and My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy. His awards include the National Book Award for poetry and two Guggenheims. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

From Publishers Weekly:

It is hard not to criticize any anthology that is so bent on having a "purpose." To subsume poems under a single theme is always risky, and to enroll them in a cause detracts from their artistic nature. The poets selected here--everyone from Hesiod to Yeats, Li Po to Dickinson--are first-rate, but for that very reason their work is multi-dimensional, thus hardly about, let alone "for," men. The editors have organized the book into subjects such as "Mother and Great Mother," war, father, "Wildness" and love. Their introductions to each section too often leap from the reality of men's feelings to abstractions, Jungian archetypes and myths. As advice for reading poems, their observation that "for men depression is sometimes the entrance to the soul" hardly seems helpful, and as psychology it comes close to the old masculine cliche that pain is good and one should suffer one's feelings stoically. But even if the anthology is all too manly, it contains many great poems which speak to us all regardless of sex. And, like the men's movement itself, the book bespeaks a genuine interest in overhauling conventional notions about what is masculine. Bly ( Iron John ) is a poet; Hillman ( Re-Visioning Psychology ) is a psychologist; Meade is a scholar of myth. $50,000 ad/promo.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0060924209
• ISBN 13: 9780060924201
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 560
• Editor: Bly Robert, Hillman James, Meade Michael