also with himself. As Arthur Oberg puts it, the poems describe “a poetic self that is still learning to bury the dead and to walk among the living.” “Homage to the Runner,” also the title of a column Bell wrote, is about running, one of Bell’s athletic outlets, but also about poetry and how poetry affects others. Running and poetry both involve “pain,” and “the love of form is a black occasion/ through which some light must show/ in a hundred years of commitment.” While there is “some light,” the occasion is “black.” The runner and poet “ache” to end the race and poem, which begin in darkness, but there “is no finish; you can stop [running or writing] for no one,” not even family, as much as you care for them.

Residue of Song

Residue of Song contains thirteen poems to Bell’s father and concerns loneliness. “Residue of Song” begins by stating that “you were writing a long poem, yes,/ about marriage, called ’On Loneliness.’” Like the “probable” in his A Probable Volume of Dreams, the “residue” also undercuts its subject matter. In fact, in “Residue of Dreams” “you” decide not to write the poem. In Bell’s poem it is the speaker who is the lonely one as he describes a woman’s egotism and violence and his callous responses to her; but, as is usually the case with Bell, the poem ends in bittersweet acceptance of the “residue” in a relationship:

 Your cries, for ecstatic madness, are not sadder than some things. From the residue of song, I have barely said my love  again, as if for the last time, believing that you will leave me.

The use of “barely” and “as if” is part of Bell’s tendency to qualify, to undercut, and to leave meaning implied but not defined.

Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See

Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See contains poems about Dorothy, Bell’s wife, but also includes several poems about poetry. In his “To a Solitary Reader,” an allusion to William Wordsworth’s poem about the solitary reaper, Bell discusses the development of his poetry: “If once he slept with Donne/ (happily) now he sleeps/ with Williams/ the old Williams.” Bell thereby indicates his movement from John Donne’s metaphysical style to William Carlos Williams’s stress on a poem being, rather than meaning. The remainder of the poem distinguishes between “memory,” which is what we “are” in the sense that “they/ think they know us,” and what our “being” is, that which is inexplicable, without meaning. The poem concludes, “Time’s determinant./ Once I knew you.” Bell leaves behind certainty and memory and instead embraces the idea that nothing can be “known.”

These Green-Going-to-Yellow

In the title poem of These Green-Going-to Yellow the poet states, “I’m raising the emotional ante” by attempting to align himself with nature, particularly the leaves of a gingko tree someone planted in New York City. The poem concerns people’s perspectives on life and asks if they really see beauty. Of course, the answer is “no.” People look down “not to look up” and “look at the middles of things.” Comfortable with mediocrity, like the seasons, people go from green to yellow, age like autumn, and lose their creative powers. Bell declares that people’s perspective would be different “if we truly thought that we were gods.” This line denies people even an erroneous presumption about their place in the universe, but in his acceptance of the situation Bell somehow remains “green.” He has said, “I started out green and I intended to remain so.”

The Book of the Dead Man and Ardor

In the Dead Man poems in The Book of the Dead Man and Ardor, Bell moves in a new direction, adopting a persona or mask that he often denies but on at least one occasion accepts: “He was my particular and my universal./ I leave it to the future to say why.” The Dead Man has enabled Bell to erase distinctions such as the one between life and death. In “About the Dead Man” the poet writes, “He [the Dead Man] thinks himself alive because he has no future.” Statements like this, especially when they are preceded by and followed by other seemingly unrelated statements, would appear to be incredibly complicated, but Bell asserts that they are complex, rather than complicated. Complexity, for him, is “the fabric of life and the character of emotion.” In his poetry things “connect,” even if the connections are not always apparent to the reader.

The “Baby Hamlet” poem in this section embodies Bell’s ideas about complexity, which requires “a fusion of many elements, some of them seemingly disparate, even contradictory.” Hamlet’s indecision is fused with the world’s indecision, its “hopeless pacifism” and the “Platonic ideal carried to its logical inconclusion.” According to Bell, “It doesn’t seem a stretch to me to parallel Hamlet’s indecision with the world’s reluctance to act early and decisively against the Nazis.” After all, “events occur while waiting for the news./ Or stuck in moral neutral.”