Sleepers Joining Hands - Harper colophon books Author:Robert Bly "I see in my own poems and the poems of so many other poets alive now fundamental attempts to right our own spiritual balance, by encouraging those parts in us that are linked with music, with solitude, water and trees, the parts that grow when we are far from the centers of ambition." So writes Robert Bly at the conclusion of his prose piece "I... more » Came Out of the Mother Naked," embedded in this collection of poems as its animating source. In it, Bly reconstructs the mythology of matriarchal consciousness.
The piece is meant to show the reader the way into the poems that surround it and then beyond the poems into her or his own deeply buried awareness of the Good Mother, the Death Mother, the Ecstatic Mother, and the Teeth Mother. First published in 1973, "Sleepers Joining Hands" has been widely and steadily read as one of the books that mark the revolutionary return of feminine consciousness in our era.
Robert Bly lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is the author, editor, and translator of numerous collections of poetry. His most recent books are "Iron John: A Book About Men" and "American Poetry."« less