This canny, brilliant and moving collection of poetry (some 400 poems!) was originally based on poems recited and recalled at the many men’s gatherings led by these teachers of the masculine soul: Robert Bly, Michael Meade, and James Hillman.

Arranged around themes such as “I Know the Earth, and I Am Sad,” “Making a Hole in Denial,” “The Naive Male,” “The Cultivated Heart,” and “The Spindrift Gaze Toward Paradise,” these poems are those “that speak to men in a rhetoric calculated to penetrate to the bone.”   But note: this anthology is highly nourishing for poetic readers of any gender persuasion.

Here’s one included, by that wonderful Spanish poet, Antonio Machado (Robert Bly translation):

The wind, one brilliant day, called to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

“In return for the odor of my jasmine, I’d like  all the odor of your roses.”

“I have no roses; all the flowers in my garden  are dead.”

“Well then, I’ll take the withered petals and the yellow leaves and the water of the fountain.”

The wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself: “What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?”

This volume goes far to disprove the proposition that poetry has no meaning for our times. It feeds a hunger in the soul that can be satisfied by few other means.