Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy: Poems
    Unavailable
    My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy: Poems
    Unavailable
    My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy: Poems
    Ebook113 pages49 minutes

    My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy: Poems

    By Robert Bly

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Readers have found Robert Bly’s ghazals startling and new; they merge wildness with a beautiful formality. The ghazal form is well-known in Islamic culture, but only now finding its way into the literary culture of the West.

    Each stanza of three lines amounts to a finished poem. “God crouches at night over a single pistachio. / The vastness of the Wind River Range in Wyoming / Has no more grandeur than the waist of a child.”

    The ghazal’s compacted energy is astounding. In a period when much American poetry is retreating into prosaic recordings of daily events, these poems do the opposite. 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 more bold. This book includes the already famous poem against the Iraq War, “Call and Answer”: “Tell me why it is we don¹t 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.

    This book reestablishes Bly's position as one of the greatest poets of our era. After many years of free verse in American poetry, years which have been very fertile, the inventive ghazal helps the imagination to luxuriate in a form once more. We are seeing a poetry emerge that is recovering many of the great intensities that modern art and poetry has aimed at and achieved in earlier generations.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 6, 2009
    ISBN9780061979842
    Unavailable
    My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy: Poems
    Author

    Robert Bly

    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 lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

    Read more from Robert Bly

    Related to My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      Five Poems
      5 min read

    • Article

      Fifteen Poets on Revision

      Feb 27, 2018

      After 17 drafts over two weeks, Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art” was completed on November 4, 1975. The poem began as notes, and evolved into a villanelle. She changed the title. She deleted words. She reached for possible rhymes. Brett Candlish Mil

      4 min read

    • Article

      TheTimeIsNow

      Jun 14, 2023

      Suggested Reading: The Art of Revising Poetry: 21 U.S. Poets on Their Drafts, Craft, and Process (Bloomsbury, June 2023) edited by Charles Finn and Kim Stafford “There has long been a gap in the writing trade,” the editors write in the introduction t

      2 min read

    • Article

      Reviewers & Critics

      Aug 18, 2021

      WALTON Muyumba’s astute, engaging literary and cultural criticism can be found in a wide variety of influential media outlets, from magazines like the Atlantic, the New Republic, the Believer, and the Oxford American to newspapers like the New York T

      4 min read

    • Article

      Think What a Poem Might Do: A Conversation with Jill Bialosky and Matthew Zapruder

      Aug 17, 2017

      What, if anything, do you think poetry can do for us in these difficult times? The post Think What a Poem Might Do: A Conversation with Jill Bialosky and Matthew Zapruder appeared first on The Millions.

      10 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: March 2019

      Mar 4, 2019

      For several reasons, there is only one thing I demand from my own lines, or from any poetry I love—I want to read it and to have a sense of having lived. The post Must-Read Poetry: March 2019 appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      May 1, 2022

      Proof your dream is true: seeingthe Prophet’s face. As a child in Mecca,I once imagined I saw him. We prayed for whole dayson rugs behind the concentric circles of people doing tawaf.White marble everywhere! Soon even the air looked hazywith light, s

      1 min read

    • Article

      Until The Sea Closed Over Us And The Light Was Gone

      Jul 1, 2020

      —Dante, Canto XXVI But if the truth is dreamed of toward the morning—El Paso Although it was really last summer’s song,all this summer Despacito played on as slower then I turned myself to gazeupon Juarez. The summer everything hurts my eyes, a dozen

      6 min read

    • Article

      Mountain Time

      Jan 1, 2021

      In the air you don’t know who you are or where My own self feels it is in wind being born These are currents a man made one eighth of smokeless fire fears but chooses A path south from Anchorage to a Mountain House Ungovern the northern land to pass

      10 min read

    • Article

      In The Palace Of Forgetting

      Jan 1, 2023

      In the spring of 2019, poet Matthew Kelsey suffered the loss of his mother. Less than a year later, he would lose his father to COVID-19. The following is a poem-interview between Keith Leonard (questions) and Matthew Kelsey (answers) that began in J

      12 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Nov 1, 2019

      for Rouge they do not knowthe joy they walk with their footprints a lessonof faith O faithful companion of lonelinessthe name we gave you was not a name but a cryand you stayedand now they come to hunt in the wildnot for meat not with the ritual for

      4 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems by Dan Poppick

      Nov 19, 2019

      Three Poems by Dan Poppick
      1 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Joseph Brodsky

      May 12, 2020

      Two Poems by Joseph Brodsky
      7 min read

    • Article

      Jan Morris

      Jun 15, 2018

      I have always rather envied the poet Ovid, who was banished from Rome by the emperor Augustus, you may remember, to a remote place called Tomis on the shores of the Black Sea. There he died, ten years later, and his exile has gone into legend and int

      17 min read

    • Article

      Hiraeth

      Apr 7, 2022

      Read the judges’ comments at http://writ.rs/wmmay22 FIRST PLACE £200 Damien McKeating has written stories since his primary school teachers taught him how to put letters together into words. If he looks vague when he talks to you, he’s either working

      6 min read

    • Article

      As the World Collapses

      Jul 27, 2017

      As the World Collapses
      7 min read

    • Article

      Stop Hating on Adjectives!

      Jun 12, 2019

      A common admonition in creative writing pedagogy is, “Cut as many adjectives as possible.” I propose that this rule springs from mere prejudice. The post Stop Hating on Adjectives! appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy

    4/5

    6 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words