Stealing Sugar from the Castle: Selected and New Poems, 1950–2013

Bly has such such a massive body of work as a writer, translator, and editor that collecting all of it can be daunting. "Stealing Sugar From The Castle" offers a relatively concise and well-chosen collection of his highly imaginative poetry spanning his long career. As either an introductory volume to his poetry or a pack-along book to satisfy a mobile jones for poetry that demands the reader remain flexible and open to virtually limitless leaps of imaginative virtuosity, this is the book to get. If you get only one book of Bly's poetry, this is the one I recommend you buy.

I've been studying this book with poet/teacher Fran Quinn. It is an awesome collection of Robert Bly. I have learned more of why and how I believe what I do by studying this book of poetry than I have in any other way. Awesome collection of Robert Bly's deep thoughts and passionate beliefs.

Certainly better than I could do! But that’s not quite the standard I was going for. Kind of basic. Filled with insight... some artfully presented, some heaped onto the page like potatoes and stuffing at your in-laws half-assed holiday dinner. The title is my favorite thing about it.

As usual Bly's poems are deep yet easy to get into. I liked all the poems.

Robert Bly is one of our ages great poet and this is a great anthology of his work.

It's my bedtime story book.......beautiful, meaningful way to go to sleep and wake for a new day with an alert mind to all the worlds.

Great book by an amazing poet, Bly's last collection is truly a treasure and definitely worth the price, strongly recommended by this fellow warrior poet...

A beautiful selection from one of the greatest.

The main problem with this book in my view is that the magnificent early books Silence in the Snowy Fields and The Light Around the Body are afforded a fraction of space in the book comparative to recent collections from the past twenty years which are significantly less satisfying as poetry; this is a typical phenomenon in selected editions of poems when the poet themselves are involved in the editorial process.Another issue is that poems which were not of the same collection originally have been subsequently grouped together here in new sequences; for example poems from as late as 1978 are grouped in the largely 1962 sequence of Silence in the Snowy in the Snowy Fields, without any indication to a reader as to which poems were published in which years originally - this type of revisionism and scrambling of provenance I don't generally find helpful when accessing career overviews of poets.Finally, it would have been nice to see some of Bly's magnificent translations included in here, for example Kabir and Lorca, as they inform his work.This book served me as a gateway to Bly's poetry (which at its best is some of the best of the 20th century), however I plan to sell this edition and use the money to purchase 2nd hand editions of the two aforementioned collections released in the 1960s - to access the cream of this poet's work.