Nightworks

Marvin Bell

Combining twenty new poems with selections from his previous volumes, Nightworks abundantly demonstrates why Bell’s voice has been continually praised for its lucidity and eloquence. Marvin Bell is at the peak of his formidable powers in this major collection from one of American poetry’s true innovators.

Paperback: $18.00 list price

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ISBN: 9781556591808

Format: Paperback

Origin of Dreams

Out from muted bee-sounds and musketry
(the hard works of our ears, dissembling),
under steeply-held birds (in that air
the mind draws of our laid breathing),
out from light dust and the retinal gray,
your face as in your forties appears
as if to be pictured, and will not go away.

I have shut up all my cameras, really,
Father, and thought I did not speak to you,
since you are dead. But you last;
are proved in the distance of a wrist.
Your face in dreams sends a crinkly static
and seems, in its mica- or leaf-like texture,
the nightworks of the viscera.

But feeling’s not fancy, fancying you.
I don’t forget you, or give stinks for thanks.
I think I think the bed’s a balcony,
until we sleep. Then our good intentions
lower us to the dead, where we live.
I think that light’s a sheet for the days,
which we lose. Then we go looking.

About the Author

Marvin Bell, author of twenty-three books of poetry and essays, has been called “an insider who thinks like an outsider,” and his writing has been called “ambitious without pretension.” Reviewing The Book of the Dead Man for The Georgia Review, Judith Kitchen noted: “These new books by Marvin Bell are doing to poetry what has occasionally been done before—sending it into new and original territory. Bell has redefined poetry as it is being practiced today.” His latest books are After …

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Reviews

“One of our finest and most acclaimed poets.” —Booklist

“Bell has redefined poetry as it is being practiced today.” —Georgia Review

“Nightworks is a revelation. Gathered together, these poems are like the illuminated map of a powerful inner life, an imagination driven to understand its own powers and limitations in order to earn a place in a death-haunted and contingent universe.” —A Bookworm

“A lovely book. Marvin Bell is a muse of his own.” —James Naiden, from a “Reader Comment” card

“Bell renders refreshingly unpredictable the passage from one image or idea to the next. Odd transitions convey an essential quality of his sensibility and vision… Bell’s poems, beyond their formal mastery, constitute an admirable project whose interrogations run deep.” —Poetry

“Nightworks reminds us just how distinctive Marvin Bell’s voice has been all along—how prophetic, how candid, how rigorously philosophical. To recognize the voice of an important and well-established poet, and then to hear in it something new, enlarges our understanding of what poetry can do.” —Judith Kitchen, Georgia Review

“… a genuine treat.” —North American Review

“To partake of Nightworks, to discover the journey that Marvin Bell has taken, is to be constantly amazed.” —James Naiden, North Stone Review

“Bell has collected his best poetry in this impressive volume. The pieces exemplify his wit and his skilled, imaginative leaps… One thing that unites these works… is Bell’s passion for exploring the traces of paradox in languages, culture, and nature.” —Virginia Quarterly Review