Night Abraham Called to the Stars: Poems

Accepting the powerful models that Islamic poetry, including the poetry of Rumi and Hãfez, provide, the National Book Award -- winning poet Robert Bly transmutes the ghazal from into a stunning series of poems.

In The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, Robert Bly offers Western readers the opportunity to experience the thrilling leaps that the ghazal form allows. In the ghazal, each stanza is an independent poem, so the writer is able to shift landscapes. One stanza may be biographical, the next may have a reference to myth, the next a meditation on conscience.

In these poems, the reader will find many references to our own cultural past, as in Sir Isaac Newton, Gustav Mahler, ZLord Tennyson, Francis Bacon, and Madame Bovary, figures who belong to our intellectual history. The poems bring something startling and new. Merging wildness and a beautiful formality, The Night Abraham Called to the Stars is Robert Bly's greates volume of poetry and ensures his reputation as one of the major poets of our era.