Marvin Bell does love poetry. He loves the very idea of it. And in Old Snow Just Melting, his new collection of essays and interviews, he loves writing and talking about poetry and does so with a joy and an obvious commitment that are contagious….

Old Snow Just Melting … brings together twenty-one essays with such titles as "I Was a Boston (Marathon) Bandit (On Assignment)" and "Learning from Translations" and four interviews including "The University Is Something Else You Do" and "Self Is a Very Iffy Word for Me." All were, he points out, done on assignment, including eleven essays written from 1974 to 1978 for The American Poetry Review, published here under the title "Homage to the Runner." Even the titles indicate the range of subjects in these pieces, from teaching to Hugo to pain, and the range of attitudes, playfulness-going-to-seriousness (as he might say). (p. 332)

I do think you will be disappointed if you expect, in Old Snow Just Melting, a book of criticism. And you will be disappointed if you expect a fully drawn, straightforward statement of poetics; this is more a poetics-in-the-making. If you can give Bell a little room, though, as you do that old friend who takes so long to tell a "simple" story, the one who winds around and forgets and gestures wildly and maybe even invents a little, you will be doubly rewarded. After all, when your friend finally finishes his story, haven't you learned more than the story itself? Haven't you learned something about your friend?

Now a couple of years old, These Green-Going-to-Yellow is to my mind one of Marvin Bell's best books of poetry…. In a day of hermit-poets, watered-down confessional poets, self-absorbed poets, diary-poets and poets-of-the-private-language, Bell's richly populated poems are a welcome return back to the world of people. By my count, in fact, all but two of the thirty-one poems in These Green-Going-to-Yellow include characters other than the speaker. (p. 334)

What the people in Bell's poems have to contend with is indicated in the title. These Green-Going-to-Yellow identifies the natural and inevitable decay of the world: trees die here, and birds, and pigs; the seasons change; people pass away and are missed; wars claim lives faster than ever. Maybe it is only a coincidence, but many of Bell's best poems here are those in which the speaker both admits to loss (or meanness or decay) and then tries to give back something to fill the void. In the beautiful "The Hedgeapple," the speaker and his friends have nearly taken a hedgeapple from a woman's tree…. The poem ends in a gesture of unabashed guilt-going-to-generosity, since he cannot bear to have almost stolen "someone else's treasure."… (pp. 334-35)

Bell's form is relaxed, even rambling at times. His voice is casual, but is capable of the beauty that clear language can bring. Only infrequently in these poems do I sense Bell allowing his form too much leisure or his voice too much ease. ["To an Adolescent Weeping Willow"], though, typifies such temptation…. The poem ends with the speaker's realization of the fallacy of his own metaphor—that the easy-moving tree and his hard-working father aren't alike. But Bell's language is a touch too easy too. I think Bell is less effective … when he depends too much on the momentum and character (even charm) of his style to make up for looseness. In fact, hasn't this been identified as a problem of many poets from the generation just prior to Bell's: that, having struggled to develop recognizable and convincing styles, they sometimes seem satisfied, simply and almost always ineffectively, to imitate themselves? I certainly don't think it's a problem for Bell generally. But I don't want it to become one either. He has come far already, and his poems, at their best, are among our current best. (pp. 335-36)