Nightworks Poems, 1962-2000

Bell writes often about trees--their deep and anchoring roots, their uprightness and solidity, their endurance and embodiment of time--and his life work, gathered in this substantial volume, stands like a tree on the landscape of American poetry. A teacher for 35 years at the Iowa Writer's Workshop and recently named Iowa's first poet laureate, Bell, a master of plain but finely crafted and resonant language, has been winning prizes ever since the publication of his first book, Things We Dreamt We Died For (1966). His poems are philosophical, concerned most often with the pairing of life and death, which he ponders with a reliable frankness and, over the years, an increasing sense of liberation. World War II has been a catalyst for poems about soldiers, the Holocaust, family, and love. In "Our Subject Death," he states, "the dead are not dead," a vision that inspired The Book of the Dead Man (1994), well represented here, and his newest work, a gorgeous cycle titled "Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man's Footsteps," which caps this essential collection. Donna Seaman

Beginning with new, still Berryman-like "dead man" poems ("Yesterday, a people./ Tomorrow, an obit, a footnote, an explanation"), then proceeding chronologically from 1966's Things We Dreamt We Died For, this new & selected shows a poet obsessed with politics, the nature of words, a father's death, passing time, army life and, noticeably often, willful leaves: "The leaves are kites/ What are their goals?" But the repetitive imageryÄsoap twice dissolves in water, branches repeatedly interact with the airÄis kept fresh by Bell's ever-loosening style. The strictly organized early poems here draw philosophy from acute observation of the particular, and profess their allegiances: "I believe words have meaning"; "Poetry cripples. Tempus Fugit."; "Some acts I could never, not/ forthrightly, not by flanking you, accomplish." By the 1980s, Bell had moved from rhythmic free-verse lines to prose sentences, his verse-paragraphs uniting surreally discordant ideas under a single head ("The banana is stronger than the human head in the following ways:") that didn't always have enough unifying force. But in the "dead man" poems, which begin in the '90s, Bell has found (as Berryman found in Henry), the mortality that oddly and smoothly lurks beneath nostalgia, narcissism, "Oneself" and "One's Other Self"Äand which finally forces their rejection. The dead man "likes listening to ears of corn," "can balance a glass of water on his head without trembling," "counts by ones and is shy before your mildest adorations" and is certainly unique within the literature of late life. He allows us a kaleidoscopic look into the "struggle[] not to become crabby, chronic or hypothetical" and a pull for "[o]ne last late-night toot from the pantheistic locomotive." Taking the place of New and Selected Poems (1987) and A Marvin Bell Reader (1994), this selection shows a poet progressing to the peak of his powers, from which the "Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man's Footsteps" continue to issue full force. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved