"Chinese Tomb Guardians" by Robert Bly

Poet Robert Elwood Bly was born in Lac qui Parle County, Minnesota on this day in 1926.

"Oh yes, I love you, book of my confessions
where what was swallowed, pushed away, sunken,
driven down, begins to rise from the earth 
once more, and the madness and rage from the wells.
The buried is still buried, like cows who eat
in a collapsed strawpile all winter to get out."
--from "Chinese Tomb Guardians" by Robert Bly

POEMS ABOUT SCULPTURE is a unique anthology of poems from around the world and across the ages about our most enduring art form. Sculpture has the longest memory of the arts: from the Paleolithic era, we find stone carvings and clay figures embedded with human longing. And poets have long been fascinated by the idea of eternity embodied by the monumental temples and fragmented statues of ancient civilizations. From Keats’s Grecian urn and Shelley’s “Ozymandias” to contemporary verse about Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Janet Echelman’s wind-borne hovering nets, the pieces in this collection convert the physical materials of the plastic arts—clay, wood, glass, marble, granite, bronze, and more—into lapidary lines of poetry. Whether the sculptures celebrated here commemorate love or war, objects or apparitions, forms human or divine, they have called forth evocative responses from a wide range of poets, including Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Rilke, Dickinson, Yeats, Auden, and Plath. A compendium of dazzling examples of one art form reflecting on another, Poems About Sculpture is a treat for art lovers of all kinds. READ an excerpt from the foreword here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/…/poems-about-sculpture…/