What strikes one immediately about Marvin Bell's wonderful new book, These Green-Going-to-Yellow … is the sense of quiet that pervades them and the deceptive understatement of nearly every poem. Even more than Bell's previous book, Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See, his new collection offers poems that express their fluent and steady peace with the world.

Although many of the poems in These Green-Going-to-Yellow are set in distant locales—Hawaii, Tangier, Alaska, Cuba, Italy, Spain, France—they seek not to appropriate the exotica of their surroundings but to recognize the dailiness and immediacy, yet intrinsic otherness, of their settings. (p. 227)

Throughout this volume, Bell has chosen a more straightforward and unadorned diction, a diction capable of becoming alternately reflective and immediate. Yet there is still the verbal play and sly wit, the marvelous turns and reversals familiar to readers of Bell's earlier books. Because the poems in These Green-Going-to-Yellow are more consistently, more unashamedly narrative than in the past, Marvin Bell's aphoristic gifts have never seemed more successful; interwoven in the narrative fabric of the poems, these moments seem so inevitable and yet so surprising. Bell is constantly able to bring the reader up short with a sudden shift in tone; he has become masterful at quite invisibly shifting the grounds of argument upon the reader, and he often makes his exit in these poems with a disarming and winning directness…. [Each] of the poems in These Green-Going-to-Yellow holds within it that resolute core of self that Bell recognizes as the one "home" he will carry within himself always and to any distance. This careful, subtle book needs to be read more than once, as with each reading it accrues with power and vision. (pp. 227-28)