Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See, Marvin Bell's fourth volume, is a disarming book, deceptive in its simplicity and altogether seductive in its beauty. If others have made much of the verbal intelligence and knotty wit in Bell's work, and rightly so, what has most often been ignored is the extreme delicacy of the voice in his most lyric poems. Though Bell's playful, metaphysical intelligence is always pleasing, it is when this intelligence grows most fluid and intimate that the poems most completely succeed. It is this same delicacy, for example, which informs the much anthologized poem "Treetops" from Bell's first book, A Probable Volume of Dreams. It is the immediacy of this voice and the implicit pleas which draw us to a poem such as "We Have Known" from The Escape Into You, his second book…. (p. 314)

That same sense of being, as readers, invited into the landscape of a privacy overheard continues throughout Bell's third book, Residue of Song. The fluid self-dialogue of the title poem … as well as the intimate address of the sequence "You Would Know" (for his dead father) both serve to join us with the experiences Bell seizes. (p. 315)

For some time now, it has seemed as if Bell has wanted to abandon the complications of syntax which have sometimes marked other of his poems, even though they were nearly always genial complications. He has sought a plainer speech, as American and colloquial as Williams'. Since Gary Snyder's haybucker in "Hay For The Horses" many poets have tried to appropriate into their poems a gritty, tough-talking American character, and to thereby earn for themselves some similar authority or "authenticity." But in Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See, Bell has found within his own voice that American voice, and with it the ability to write convincingly about the smallest details of a personal history. He has found the maturity to meet with an enviable generosity those otherwise ordinary domestic events and routines of a daily life…. And what in some poets has always seemed a Puritan underpinning to our ideas of American speech ("straight talk, no nonsense") instead reads in Bell simply as a belief that words might possibly mean what they say. Yet this never leads him to contend, as it apparently has others, that beauty in language is the snake-oil of poetry. Nor does Bell ever feel called upon to abandon his intelligence to retain his identity as an American.

Throughout Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See, the overwhelming concern is for wholeness. The poems seek to establish the self in relation to the natural, as in poems such as "The Self and the Mulberry" … and "Bits and Pieces of Our Land."… The poems consider the self's relation to the fragments of the past and the vague promises we name the future, yet they rely on nothing so grand as these summations imply. The poems are invariably located in the moment, the idea arising from the fact. Each seems as earthbound as a prayer, for what but a life on earth prompts us to prayer? (pp. 315-16)

Slowly, through a reading of the book, we assume a trust in the voice of these poems, a trust enhanced by the instances of sheer lyric beauty. (p. 317)

[It] is the daily incident transformed, the minute detail serving as fulcrum to the poem, which informs nearly all of Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See. Bell has sought out the most physical mirrors for his considerations of the self. He refuses to dazzle us with mysterious possibilities; instead, he is happy now to talk with us plainly, until we feel we understand.

It is in the poem "Trinket," which I take to be the real and secret Ars Poetica of the book, that Bell most clearly outlines his methods and concerns. The pacing is deliberate and exact, like the movement of the poem's water through a crack in a fern pot. The poem's humor is measured and human. It is not in grandeur that the self is to be found, but in this minute trickle of water through the cracked, baked earthen pot. It is this trinket, this gift, which is to be found and shared. The poem enacts the same balance of self Bell has sought in all of the book, and the pervasive presence in the poem steadies as we, like the water, move slowly out of what contains us. It is this delicate balancing act, between ambition and peace,… between our self-consciousness and the natural, which "Trinket" allows us to perform…. (pp. 318-19)