Nightworks [Hardcover]

Marvin Bell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2000

During the past forty years Marvin Bell has been one of poetry’s true innovators. With each book his writing seems in constant motion, always developing ideas and exploring new literary territory. His voice changes not to fit current literary fashion, but to serve his art, to serve the wide—and often entertaining—range of subjects and ideas at the heart of his poems.

Nightworks is a refreshing retrospective on the distinguished poet and educator’s work. It collects poems from a dozen previous books—together with forty-two new poems—and makes available poems from volumes long out of print, including groundbreaking books such as The Escape Into You and National Book Award finalist Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See. It amply demonstrates why Bell’s poetic voice has been continually praised for its lucidity and eloquence, and has been rightly characterized as ambitious without pretension.
"To Dorothy"

You are not beautiful, exactly.
You are beautiful, inexactly.
You let a weed grow by the mulberry
and a mulberry grow by the house.
So close, in the personal quiet
of a windy night, it brushes the wall
and sweeps away the day till we sleep.
A child said it, and it seemed true:
"Things that are lost are all equal."
But it isn't true. If I lost you,
the air wouldn't move, nor the tree grow.
Someone would pull the weed, my flower.
The quiet wouldn't be yours. If I lost you,
I'd have to ask the grass to let me sleep.

"One of our finest and most acclaimed poets."—Booklist

Marvin Bell’s poetry has appeared in scores of anthologies and in magazines such as The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly. He has lectured and read at universities in 45 states and territories, is the recipient of the Lamont Award and teaches in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

Also available by Marvin Bell
The Book of the Dead Man
PB $12.00, 1-55659-063-6 • CUSA
HC y $22.00, 1-55659-062-8 • CUSA
Ardor: The Book of the Dead Man, Volume 2
PB $14.00, 1-55659-081-4 • CUSA
Iris of Creation
PB $10.00, 1-55659-032-6 • CUSA

Less Self

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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 imageryAsoap twice dissolves in water, branches repeatedly interact with the airAis 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"Aand 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.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press (September 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556591470
• ISBN-13: 978-1556591471
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,752,359 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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