BLY, Robert. The Teeth Mother Naked at Last. San Francisco: City Lights Books. 1978.
Small 4to. Original illustrated card wrappers; pp. [2], 5-22 ; discolouration on binding and slight bruising on top and bottom binding; binding detached as well as on gutter from back wrapper; pp.12-13; otherwise very good.
First edition.
Hugh Kenner, writing in the New York Times Book Review, remarked that “Bly is attempting to write down what it’s like to be alive, a state in which, he implies, not all readers find themselves all the time.” The Teeth Mother Naked At Last is prasied as one of the most moving and noteworthy Anti-War poems at the time of Vietnam. The language Bly employs in the poem is creatively plagiarised from the rhetoric of the institutions Bly is challenging; the contrived language of politicians such as President Lyndon Johnson, the phrases of the mlitary and the repetitive, avoidant strains of an ever growing mass media.
The myth aligned with the poems title is that of The Great Mother, which emphasises societies rejection of the 'female psyche' in favour of a spiritual estrangement; the psyche devoid of emotional propensity and the ability to engage with a creative consicous, an inability exemplified by the dominant figure of The Teeth Mother. Bly makes the claim that Vietnam was the product of this disavowal of spirituality and the poem stands as one of the most powerful excavations of the betrayal of a psychology which, in it's famished state, has been ursupred by war and poverty.
In 1966 Robert Bly and David Ray founded American Writers Against The Vietnam War, which organised the first "Read-Ins" against the war.
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