Marvin Bell

"Live as if you were already dead" is the Zen admonition animating Marvin Bell's brilliant poetic invention, Dead Man Poems.

The Collected Dead Man Poems

Incarnate

Marvin Bell has the largest heart since Walt Whitman.--Harvard Review

Poems, 1962-2000

Nightworks

The Dead Man returns in Vertigo, Marvin Bell’s latest vibrant and provocative collection. A master of the surreal yet everyday, Bell created his everyman—a character unlike any other in American poetry—in the late 1980s and has continued to improvise on the life of the Dead Man, looking ahead while grappling with “the beginning, when mountains, canyons and seas were new, / before the moon had eyes, before paper, before belief.” The Dead Man is an overarching consciousness that stands witness to violence and political turmoil, celebrates daily joys, and challenges the scope of human knowledge. Bell’s uninhibited imagination and powerful command of language are at their best in Vertigo.

Vertigo

Marvin Bell’s uninhibited imagination and often gritty curiosity have always taken on wildly diverse subjects. In these new poems he ventures far and near, from war in the Middle East and famine in Sudan, to surfing in Hawaii and life in Catatonia. In Rampant, the ancient Greeks are at the horizon, the crab boats are tethered to the pier, Louis Braille is being re-entombed, Vaccination Day has arrived, and parasites discuss us in the future. Bell has said he “likes ideas to have a little dirt on their shoes.” By the conclusion of Rampant, his shoes are well-traveled. The suite, “Journal of the Posthumous Present,” was commissioned by the Getty Research Institute and featured on the cover of American Poetry Review. Remarkable for its formal approach and its socio-philosophical investigation, it is simultaneously groundbreaking and characteristic of this unique poet’s long, distinguished career.

Rampant

Mars Being Red is the most political book of Marvin Bell’s storied career—and one of his most beautiful. Appalled by our government’s military aggression and destructive ideologies, he responded with a book willing to risk all, in an atypical book of personal poetry that delivers political goods.

Mars Being Red

A collection—Bell’s eighth—that displays the poet at the height of his powers. Emotional and intellectual rigor are everywhere abundant in the poems of Iris of Creation. Marvin Bell’s poems often begin where personal, philosophical, and political experiences intersect. Bell’s quirky, lively imagination and idiomatic language admit a plethora of influences and experiences, articulating the need for personal transformation from within. This collection displays the poet at the height of his powers.

Iris of Creation

Defiantly nontraditional poems by poet who has been called “an insider who thinks like an outsider,” Ardor continues the work Marvin Bell began with his groundbreaking The Book of the Dead Man. An acknowledged master of poetic forms and ideas, Bell is a metamorphic poet who writes with authority, wit and intelligence. In Ardor he reinvigorates the everyday in poems which are by turns surreal, deadpan, outrageous, incisive, and perceptive.

The Book of the Dead Man, Vol. 2

Ardor

New and Selected Poems

A series of thirty-three poems describe the feelings and experiences of a dead man as he expresses the knowledge and wisdom gains on the boundary between life and death

The Book of the Dead Man

Selected Poetry and Prose

A Marvin Bell Reader

Essays and Interviews

Old Snow Just Melting

Woo Havoc

William Stafford

Poetic letters between two writers deal with friendship, family life, storytelling, and the past

A Correspondence in Poetry

Segues

Poems

These Green-going-to-yellow

A moving, intensely political book from a poet whose "interrogations run deep." (Poetry)

The Dead Man, Marvin Bell’s brilliant poetic invention, is an overarching consciousness, alive and dead at once, defeating time. Mystical and anonymous, The Dead Man offers searing insight into the joys, as well as the catastrophes, of fluctuating cultural and political moments. Incarnate draws from all of Bell’s previous collections where The Dead Man appeared, and adds an abundant cache of new poems that resonate with “the dark matter and sticky stuff” of life. As David St. John writes in his introduction, “No voice in our poetry has spoken with more eloquence and wisdom of the daily spiritual, political and psychological erosion in our lives; no poet has gathered our American experience with a more capacious tenderness—all the while naming and celebrating our persistent hopes and enduring human desires....Remarkable for its eclectic and culturally diverse vision, Incarnate embodies a vivid world of poetic reflection unlike anything else in American poetry.”

From: The Book of the Dead Man

James Galvin

Poems explore the way of life of the inhabitants of the small towns of the American Midwest

Marvin Bell

About

Books

Join the club