The Light Around the Body launched Robert Bly's career as a prominent poet. It won the National Book Award, set a standard for the antiwar poetry of the period, and became a kind of anthem of the sixties. It contains such famous poems as "Johnson's Cabinet Watched by Ants," "Driving Through Minnesota During the Hanoi Raids," and follows Bly's characteristic journey from the outward world to the inward one. The poems of directly confronted grief and despair give way in the final section to such poems as "Looking into a face" and The hermit" that explore the moods and visions, images, dreams and myths of his capacious psyche, the stones that his imagination drops into the pools of his soul. - Back cover.