Marvin Bell does it [well]—this business of articulating a Jewish heritage—and the opening third of Things We Dreamt We Died For succeeds through sheer feeling in converting the stereotype of the immigrant arrived from Russia into an affective image. The Jewish father becomes the symbol of a past remembered, respected, owed to. "There will always be a Jew in Russia, / to whose grave our very talk / goes back and forth …," says "The Manipulator." "The Coat of Arms" begins: "I am seen in a landscape sometime before / the revolution…. / My name is Botsian, and the Jews are in for it." The lines suggest the differences between generations, and the remainder of the poem cries out for continuity. Such poems make for a strong first book.

Other subject matters undercut the strength. What Bell does that I don't enjoy seeing done is: be clever. And he is clever, and brittle and glib and elliptical and a player-with-language. He has the gift of lyric, but he often obliges that gift to be only rhetoric. Still the good pieces—"What Song the Soldiers Sang," "The Hole in the Sea," "Believable Linden, Pumpkin, Cherry, Etc."—are worth re-reading, and I hope these mark the poet's best direction. (p. 120)