[From A Probable Volume of Dreams through The Escape into You and Residue of Song]—the three most important books of Marvin Bell which have been published so far—we discover the poet crafting his poems in structures which keep reminding us just how much artifice is involved, and how much wit is needed to keep the poem afloat and the reader at once near and at bay. What proves telling is seeing which poems from Bell's limited edition of Things We Dreamt We Died For … get left out of A Probable Volume of Dreams: the poems tend not merely to be the weaker ones, but the less distanced ones in which there is insufficient strategy to manage where the poet-father must walk, "foot by foot," both on earth and in heaven.

If the most recent poems of Bell, those still uncollected in book form, have begun to indicate changes in both the life and the art, there are lines of continuity as well as lines of departure. Some of Bell's preferences are ingrained and resonant enough for his best poems, whatever the vintage, for us to know that if they shout back and forth at one another there will be response and commerce. (pp. 4-5)

Stanza by stanza, sequence by sequence, and book by book, Bell reminds us that he is intent on exploring the relationships among love, art, and some public, moral realm which demands faces and postures of another kind….

["An Afterword to My Father," the opening poem in A Probable Volume of Dreams,] announces a motif of fathers and sons which will run through all of Bell's work….

Although Bell is never narrowly confessional, it is important to note just how much the death of the father—his profound absence and presence—helps shape Bell's poetry and create possible worlds. The father: Bell's own dead father, and his growing sense of himself as a father who has sons and who, like him, will someday die.

The titles of The Escape into You and Residue of Song present ambiguities of time and person, loss and rescue, treasure and waste which look back toward A Probable Volume of Dreams. Bell suggests that as he moves amid father and son, woman and woman, poem as speech and poem as song, he often will be unsure whether there is anything left, whether home has been reached, whether homecoming is desirable or possible. Each of these three books is divided into sections which tell how unlinear life and art are, how "progress" is a deception of the nineteenth century, how increasingly distant the finishing line for the poet-runner proves to be. The choice is in knowing there is no choice, and in acting as if there were choices all along….

If the death of the father sets into motion A Probable Volume of Dreams as a book of homage and love, it soon becomes obvious that Bell has more than his father under his heart, or on his mind…. The father never disappears in Bell's work, but he is part of a landscape of sons and wife and friends. The dream house which the poems and the poet build toward seeks love as its foundation and song, a place where "all things are possible." The wish proves easier in the making than in the keeping. Repeatedly, poems in this volume break or give the impression of breaking into fragments. Lines are drawn across the page, and across the face. The promised dream proves not to include us, or to offer a home which it is useless to be in. Joy cannot be contained less because it runs over than because it is the nature of joy to go wounded….

It would be easy to extract from A Probable Volume of Dreams those poems that push toward the status and shine of anthology pieces: "An Afterword to My Father," "Treetops," "Let's Go, Daddy," "The Perfection of Dentistry," "The Address to the Parents," "Toward Certain Divorce." We could argue about the grouping, but that would be only to be transfixed by the integrity of whole, contained poems and thereby to forget how radically experimental and brilliant the book itself is. The feel or experience of the book is closer to that of going under or around some of the poems … in order to determine the network of feelings which at every turn or junction come into view….

In doing a review of A Probable Volume of Dreams, I noted about the song which Bell learns to sing that it "is never an easy one, but paradoxical, and when necessary, unengaging." That unengaging sense remains for me central to this book and to all of Bell's later work. It is part of a core of meaning which is variously relentless, tough, and irresistible….

By the conclusion of A Probable Volume of Dreams the poet suggests that his chances of taking his father down from the pedestal or wall are greater, and that his own chances of "entering the wall" are better than they had been at the ambiguous conclusion of "An Afterword to My Father." Barrier, after all, need not be barrier; and cloud need not be hindrance but protection, halo, and sign.

What Bell discovers in this book is how much looking and looking up he must do, and how "giving in" is not so much weak surrender as it is some strong, gracious embracing of his own life and of the lives of those close to him. (p. 5)

In The Escape into You and in Residue of Song the poet's two sons Nathan and Jason and his wife Dorothy figure as increasingly telling presences whose possible absence or loss the poet seeks to prevent….

From the poems in A Probable Volume of Dreams through those in Residue of Song we see not only how related volumes of dreams, love poems, and songs are, but how easily each book could turn into some book of the dead unless the poet is careful to see where and exactly what his kinships are. In The Escape into You we soon discover how ambiguous the title is, and how difficult again Bell's poems have a habit of being….

[The] poems in The Escape into You function as a sequence which will record a crisis, or many smaller crises, within a marriage and within a poetic self that is still learning to bury the dead and to walk among the living, loving persons who can and must sustain his life beyond the reaches of even the tallest, fullest art.

The Escape into You is not so much the detail-by-detail story of a faltering marriage and a divided poet that come together and hold together when more lasting relationships are worked out as it is the story of the slow, painful coming to awareness of a man who sees what was already there: a wife and sons who keep and have their own separateness even as they love, and a man whose better self needed only a keener looking glass to help make him up and out. What are rescue and escape, grace and craft, warning and dare: these prove leitmotifs in a drama which understands there is no single answer, but answers true for the moment or context which demanded them. For even the people are changing and changeable, not out of weakness but out of the needs and the wants which drive them on. Sons, wife, and husband join in a dance which keeps stopping so that we can see who are the partners, who is calling, and what is the dance. Only to have it all start again.

Just as William Stafford understands the "millions of intricate moves" needed to create "justice," Bell enacts in his poems the endless strategies for locating and establishing love. Love is not easy or cheap in Bell's world. As a result, we find Bell perpetually acknowledging that what the doctor ordered is not what the poet may choose to do, that all that he can do is to say he is having trouble saying how much he loves….

No matter how I address the fact, The Escape into You is a painful, exhausting book to read. As metaphysical amorist, Bell leads us to the repeated situation where dressing up is dressing down. The passages are "murky," and the feelings frequently unpleasant and ugly and small. But what saves the book and makes the book an important one is Bell's ability to reveal a radical innocence behind the witty sophistication, and a radical intelligence behind the mock stances of ignorance and foolishness. The wise fool kills off the foolish fool, and long enough before the floating drama-epic-lyric-elegy decides to close down. Only again to tell us we do not have to, and have to, go on. This is the magnanimous act and fact of the book. And it is quintessential Bell….

Poem by poem, The Escape into You moves to the turning of "So help me" as colloquialism into a moving, acceptable prayer for help and love. If poetry is "scratching," it also becomes for Bell a means toward finding an instrument and vehicle for his sad, long song. In The Escape into You the dead father comes to seem more at rest, and childhood and children and wives sink in more profoundly than they had done before. (p. 6)

With the publication of Bell's next book Residue of Song the poet suggests that he has come to some vantage point of both rest and distance. As I read the book, it is a coda to the earlier work. Of all of Bell's volumes published so far, I find it the strongest; and it contains the two poems I return to most in all the books—the title poem "Residue of Song" and the last poem in the volume "The Hurt Trees."

If compressed, intricate lyrics are always instructions for performance, Residue of Song involves a score which must be played soft, softly….

What the poet comes to with new and renewed eyes is the fact of the dead, wounded father and of his own marriage which has not only survived but deepened since he left off with versing it in The Escape into You. For this task Bell knows he needs "a pure mid-country poetry" which is English but which may not sound like English at all: a redeeming language wrung out of Iowa and a lightly hidden Long Island, and unlike the speech that any other American poet has used before.

In the title poem "Residue of Song," in "The Hurt Trees," and in such poems as the thirteen poems for the father (the You Would Know sequence), Bell is able to move beyond what had sometimes been for him a dangerous, debilitating wit to a poised, tough wisdom. These poems possess fuller closure and greater ease without forcing the poet to mark down items for less than they cost…. [They] achieve that same suspended time sense which enables the poet and the reader to admit loss and grief and to lessen them….

Residue of Song takes more than one look back, and more than one look at what the poet tried to accomplish in The Escape into You…. The Escape into You had attempted to walk the poet home; Residue of Song continues that long walk…. The Escape into You very well might have been subtitled "On Loneliness." And Residue of Song aspires in its movement through five sections—Study of the Letter A, You Would Know, Being in Love, Holding Together, and Song of the Immediacy of Death—to the feel and the experience of one more long poem in which loneliness and loss again prove central, undeniable facts….

If the unexamined life and the eternally examined life are equally unbearable, Bell moves in Residue of Song toward a perspectivism which avoids the sentimental and the nostalgic yet does not deny or profane or imitate happiness as it existed, or now exists, between father and son, father and sons, husband and wife. Bell's poems become his own sacred wood in which he refuses to romanticize hard times or hard knocks. Just as the poet goes to history and pre-history for origins and beginnings, so he now looks up to find his own planets and stars. False heroism, false idealism, and false Romanticism are rejected as the poet learns to trust what is close and familiar; the self is able to hold together because it learns to be with father and sons and wife, to be together with them.

Residue of Song shows the poet seeing what love with death should have to do. The dead and the living teach the poet that in time nothing is alien or foreign to him. He finds less of a need to hoard in(to) his poems as much as he once did. A sparer lyric emerges as he is able to say his love for his wife again, and on familiar, local ground. The scene and the air are distinctively American…. As lives open and close around him, as the parachute collapses in slow motion. Bell knows that only the close and the familiar and the American can restore the hurt, bleeding trees….

What I see as the defining achievement of Residue of Song is a slow distancing of the poet from associations and attractions which prove at odds with an evolving sense of what he wants his own poetry ultimately to be. On the one hand, the sad loneliness which always threatens to undo him—and which I connect with his Jewishness (and with the writing of Bellow, Salinger, and Roth) as much as with a larger American poetry of sadness produced by contemporary poets as different as Lowell, Berryman, Hugo, Ashbery, and James Wright—I find less in evidence here. On the other hand, a preference shared by such poets as Justice and Strand for absence and cancellation seems to be shifting in Bell toward an insistence upon what is close at hand as closest to the heart….

Recent poems of Bell uncollected in book form continue to move toward a simplicity which is no easy simplicity at all…. [There] is a new ease and tone … which seem part of some hard won awareness of just how close artlessness and ultimate artifice in fact are. (p. 7)

The latest work of Bell shows a predilection, still, for using a poetry of wit in order to address concerns of morality and aesthetics. But what is changed is Bell's ability to join that kind of poem to a poem that is more lyrical, sometimes more lyrically elegiac than he had wished or managed to be before…. (pp. 7-8)

The poetic strategies are still elaborate, even when the poet seems to walk most lightly or softly. But "license" now seems in the service of greater good: the "exclusive calculations," "sensational airwaves" and "interchangeable frequencies" of some of the past work have settled into Bell's celebration of the fact that the self has held together, that the wife and sons have not been lost in order to allow the poet to satisfy some false, wilful Romanticism in his own time.

Nor is sadness, or Bell's corner on sadness, gone. But he has begun to see sadness more in terms of joy. If happiness is an unfashionable contemporary American poetics, Bell is unafraid to start writing a new lyric which tells us we had better ascertain "who is doing the crying," and just how happy we are. (p. 8)

Arthur Oberg, "Marvin Bell: 'Time's Determinant./Once, I Knew You.'" in The American Poetry Review, Vol. 5, No. 3, May-June, 1976, pp. 4-8.