Robert Bly has had many roles in his illustrious career. He is a chronicler and mentor of young poets, many of whom he presented in his series of edited books The Fifties, The Sixties, and The Seventies. He was a leader of the antiwar movement, founded the men's movement virtually by himself, and published the bestseller Iron John. All through these activities, he has continued to deepen his own poetry, a vigorous voice in a period of more academic wordsmiths. Now, in Eating the Honey of Words, he presents the best poems he has written in the last three decades, including favorites from his earlier books such as Silence in the Snowy Fields, The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and Loving a Woman in Too Worlds. Joining these timeless classics are a number of poems from these past decades never published before, as well as a complete section of marvelous new poems from the last two years.

This book is a chance to reread, in a fresh setting, many of Bly's most famous early poems, and in some instances to see how they have changed over the years. In this new selection, one can see more clearly than ever the powerful undercurrents that carry this poetry from one book to the next.

Eating the Honey of Words is a brilliant collection that confirms Robert Bly's role as one of America's preeminent poets writing today.

The Face in the Toyota

Suppose you see a face in a Toyota
One day, and you fall in love with that face,
And it is Her, and the world rushes by
Like dust blown down a Montana street.

And you fall upward into some deep hole,
And you can't tell God from a grain of sand.
And your life is changed, except that now you
Overlook even more than you did before;

And these ignored things come to bury you,
And you are crushed, and your parents
Can't help anymore, and the woman in the Toyota
Becomes a part of the world that you don't see.

And now the grain of sand becomes sand again,
And you stand on some mountain road weeping.