The Man in the Black Coat Turns

by Robert Bly

The Man in the Black Coat Turns marks one of those rare occasions when a major poet takes a giant leap forward. In these poems Bly is writing and even seeing in a different way, encountering the world in an intensely masculine way. A man approaches his father only later in life, Bly believes, and his concentration on fathers and sons is rare in our poetry.

Genres: Poetry

62 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Robert Bly was an American poet, author, activist and leader of the Mythopoetic Men's Movement.
Robert Bly was born in western Minnesota in 1926 to parents of Norwegian stock. He enlisted in the Navy in 1944 and spent two years there. After one year at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he transferred to Harvard and thereby joined the famous group of writers who were undergraduates at that time, which included Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Harold Brodky, George Plimpton, and John Hawkes. He graduated in 1950 and spent the next few years in New York living, as they say, hand to mouth.
Beginning in 1954, he took two years at the University of Iowa at the Writers Workshop along with W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, and others. In 1956 he received a Fulbright grant to travel to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. While there he found not only his relatives but the work of a number of major poets whose force was not present in the United States, among them Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Gunnar Ekelof, Georg Trakl and Harry Martinson. He determined then to start a literary magazine for poetry translation in the United States and so begin The Fifties and The Sixties and The Seventies, which introduced many of these poets to the writers of his generation, and published as well essays on American poets and insults to those deserving. During this time he lived on a farm in Minnesota with his wife and children.
In 1966 he co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and led much of the opposition among writers to that war. When he won the National Book Award for The Light Around the Body, he contributed the prize money to the Resistance. During the 70s he published eleven books of poetry, essays, and translations, celebrating the power of myth, Indian ecstatic poetry, meditation, and storytelling. During the 80s he published Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, The Wingéd Life: Selected Poems and Prose of Thoreau,The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and A Little Book on the Human Shadow.
His work Iron John: A Book About Men is an international bestseller which has been translated into many languages. He frequently does workshops for men with James Hillman and others, and workshops for men and women with Marion Woodman. He and his wife Ruth, along with the storyteller Gioia Timpanelli, frequently conduct seminars on European fairy tales. In the early 90s, with James Hillman and Michael Meade, he edited The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, an anthology of poems from the men's work. Since then he has edited The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: Selected Poems of William Stafford, and The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy, a collection of sacred poetry from many cultures.

Reviews

[Fr. Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A difficult book to understand until surrendering to the sounds, the words, the flow. These poems are dreams, with recurring references to death, fathers, animals, men. The theme is grief, but foggy hope seems to trickle through the holes. The Man in the Black Coat Turns is a book I'll be returning to often, I think, lest its mystery fade from me.

My favorite poem here is "Four Ways of Knowledge," which gave me a perfect example (for my own writing and reading) of how poetry is sometimes the better vehicle to describe action scenes: "Later that night, he / left the room, flew / saw the temple ahead, / but grew tired, faltered, / turned back, / caught the balcony / railing, pulled himself in." One could do that in prose, but here, with the line breaks, one is taken through each step of the complex act deftly, almost dizzily.

Bly doesn't make the journey pleasant: we witness coffins, sadness, headless bodies with blood sprouting from neck-holes, animals being killed.

Visiting the Farallones

The Farallones seals clubbed,
whales gone, tortoises
taken from islands
to fill the holds, the Empire

dying in its provincial cities,
no one to repair the baths,
farms turned over
to soldiers, the judges corrupt.

The wagon behind bouncing,
breaking on boulders, back
and forth, slowly
smashed to pieces. This crumb-

ling darkness is a reality
too, the father
on the snow, the rooster's
half-eaten body nearby.

And other worlds I do not see:
The Old People's Home
at dusk, the slow
murmur of conversation.

And we aren't left with joy either. We are left with the last line of "Kneeling Down to Look Into a Culvert": "I fight - it's time - it's right - and am torn to pieces fighting." Bly's book isn't cheerful, but it tells us what's what. If one must fight, one must commit, and be torn to pieces...but must fight anyway. Profound stuff.

[Wayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A favorite by a favorite Minnesota poet. A little dark, a little gloomy, dreams and visions and images like paintings.

[Alex Obrigewitsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

No one knows why, or whence, or wherefore.
The black coat turns and returns, turning again in question.
Like for the winter dark of late December, there is no solution.
Only further questions; further turns.

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I pick this up every few months...already read it at least a dozen times, but it haunts me in a delightful fashion. Robert Bly knows how to sock it to my poetic sensibilities...

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

The more of Robert Bly I read, the more I appreciate the variety in his work, but the more I also realize I feel simultaneously expanded and baffled - I'd estimate about half his poems in a given collection resonate with me, and give me tools and viewpoints to apply to my own poetry, and the other half don't connect with or for me. Still, it's worth the effort to try.

This particular volume of poems contains themes of grief in varying forms. The book summary says he deals with male grief in particular, but I found that at the heart of it, women and men grieve the same, it's just their internalization of it may be different. Perhaps some of the poems I didn't fully grasp are because I lack the personal experience of that particular expression of grief, and others because I lack the cultural conditioning of "maleness".
Someday when I read this book again, I may understand it much more than I do now.

Support your local library!

[Jonathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've never been able to really get into Bly, whether it be his books (like Iron John) or his poetry. This collection is no exception. Few of the works resonated with me, and some poems were downright baffling. The one shining exception was "My Father's Wedding," which I found powerful and poignant. "The Grief of Men" and "A Meditation on Philosophy" were two others that I found somewhat compelling.

[Sami Al-Khalili · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dark. Unsettling. Not for me, but well-written prose.

[Jason Crane]

#SealeyChallenge day 14

[J. Michael Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bly sometimes writes poetry that I can understand, and often poems with words that just don't seem to connect with me. In this book, more did not connect. I did, however, relate to "Snowbanks North of the House," "The Convict and His Radio," "Finding an Old Ant Mansion," and "Crazy Carson's Meadow."

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compelling, if cryptic. The blurb on the back of the book is insanely maddening and, I feel, inaccurate for the text, though I guess I’ll have to investigate more into Bly’s “masculine” movement.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some interesting poems here. Pensive-provoking ways of looking at life. The second section is particularly intriguing as it is entirely made of prose poems, something which I rarely see outside of Dream or Letter poems (as Richard Hugo's work). But, for me, the final section was weak. Perhaps he was speaking to something which simply did not resonate in me, but I felt detached from the last section.

[SmarterLilac · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the most part, I do not like the poetry modern men have written about their lives or relationships. But Bly is the exception and this book is definitely my favorite work of his.