For [Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See], Marvin Bell has developed a style that steps among silence in plain shoes, making as little noise as possible. Without becoming flat, the language is held down to simplicity and quietness as if truth itself were a mild thing—Dame Patience, perhaps, or Dame Peace. Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See, though comprised of not-quite-satisfactory poems, pleases all through by its sociable small music as of wind chimes on Mid-Western porches. The style has a subdued, sweet, and confiding volubility…. You cannot help liking poetry that so obviously welcomes you, that is so gentle in itself besides. A remarkable air of sincerity, a gift of humble appreciation, a certain validating awkwardness in the diction and line-breaks, as of one who is more moved than calculating—these are enough to transform the basic style of contemporary poetry into something (as the jacket says) "unique in tone."

Bell has finally trusted himself to be direct. His earlier work twists about uncomfortably, wanting plainness yet resisting it. The poems seem both concentrated and distracted. The perfection of for instance the close of "Letting in Cold" from Residue of Song, his preceding volume, "No one approaches the father's thoughts / where he stands, at the back door, letting in cold" (to feel the chill of this, one scarcely needs to know that the father is dead), was too rare to make Bell more than "promising."

Is he better than "promising" in the new volume? Perhaps he has overshot the mark, perhaps he has sacrificed too much "charge" for the real but limited virtues of simplicity. Maybe simple verse can be great verse but Bell's seems to look down modestly at the very thought. He has put ambition to an easy death. A child's first grief, "the crack in the fern pot," "the trouble with love," elm trees, catfish, all have in his book the same emotional weight, which is no more, if no less, than that of a flat skimming stone that the hand cups momentarily, before deciding not to throw it. He is in danger of falling into a very wayside of modesty, where even his utmost seriousness has a smiling, palms-up shrugging lightness. Civilized, and genial as all get out, but meanwhile the poetry looks a little helpless. (pp. 119-20)

Frequently Bell's simplicity is … impure. Now and again his wit strains or drifts sentimentally…. Too, he could occasionally be still a degree more honest…. If we see his plainness as a poetic strategy that affects precisely an abdication of strategy, then Bell has yet to perfect its transparency, its complete and wonderful openness as of air.

But in pleasure and justice let us note how very good he can be. For one thing, he has a very subtle and unexpected ear…. For another, his language can bear very sensitive implications,… [as in] the title poem. (pp. 120-21)

Bell can now deliver for many lines at a time a fine simplicity. (See … "To Dorothy.") Still there remains for him the problem of sustaining excellence from beginning to end—in poems, in volumes—and, further, that of scale: the size of the sphere and the vigor of the clapper. (pp. 121-22)