Sleepers Joining Hands (1973), Robert Bly's third major collection of poems, is divided into three sections. The first begins with “Six Winter Privacy Poems”, and thus it evokes the lyrics of Silence in the Snowy Fields, Bly's first book. This section ends with “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last”, a long anti-war poem castigating the war in Vietnam, and is thus a sequel to the blatantly outspoken anti-war poems in Bly's second book, The Light Around the Body. The central section consists of a long prose essay, “I Came Out of the Mother Naked”, in which Bly summarises his views on “mother” and “father consciousness” and on the ways in which ancient archetypes and contempo

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Published 19 September 2001

Citation: Davis, William V.. "Sleepers Joining Hands". The Literary Encyclopedia. 19 September 2001.
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