(Includes Selections from the National Book Award Winner The Light Around the Body) "Toads nearby clap their small hands, and join / The fiery songs, their five long toes trembling in the soaked earth." Still in the midst of one of American poetry's longest and most distinguished careers, Robert Bly (b. 1926) draws his inspiration from Emerson and Thoreau, but also such non-Western authors as Rumi and Hafez. Bly is well-served by this anthology, which also includes selections from Silence in the Snowy Fields, Sleepers Joining Hands, Meditations on the Insatiable Soul, and My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, plus eight new poems.

"Here is the essential Robert Bly, 'a man in love with the setting stars,' a dark transcendentalist, a troublemaker, a mourner who keeps seeing the walls splashed with blood, a singer of boundless mysteries, imagination's keeper, a witness to joy. He has been lighting up American poetry for more than sixty years."—Edward Hirsch