Mars Being Red

May 21, 2007
In his 19th collection, Bell warns, “I am up late in wartime,” seeing “war's imprint with all of us who now/ die of the earth.” As grimly demotic as ever—but perhaps increasingly attuned to current events—Bell (Rampant
) continues to display his familiar virtues: his poems project a consistent voice, direct, laconic, and unsusceptible to illusion. He is also, now, “old, terribly aware that I am now old,” and interested in the poetry of old age, when “Each person gets worse/ in her own way.” The ongoing sequence The Book of the Dead Man
(on which Bell has worked for over a decade) continues with its sad invocations and flat free verse, one sentence per line. What sets the new poems apart from those of the 1990s also brings them close to some poets of the 1960s: they speak out directly, angrily and almost despairingly against the current administration and the war in Iraq. There are “too many body bags to bury in the mind.” Unlike many poets of protest, though, Bell ties his antiwar sentiment to an awareness that, even in peacetime, we all must die: “We need to think of what might grow in the field/ from our ashes, from the rot of our remains.”

June 1, 2007
"I'm off to the front lines in the war to preserve/ the privilege of myth-making, / the consternations of art, the nerve to think/ the future and remember the past." Bell, Iowa's first and current poet laureate, accomplishes as much in his most political collection yet. With references to Apollo, Superman, and Mars, many of his poems depend on the urgency of irony and wit to make their point. Mars is the Roman god of war and warlike fury. Bell is a furious poet who rages against war; his weapons of mass destruction are his words. He asks: "What/ shall we do, we who are at war but are asked/ to pretend we are not?" These poems consider casualties and atrocities, ironies as arbitrary as "wheelchairs colliding in the lobby" of an assisted-living facility, and the difficulties of being an army recruiter. Bell bristles about aging and muses over the possibilities of ham radios and coffee and Homeland Security. His poems ask the chronic question: Why? "The world is full of broken wings, / where pigeons roost outside the church window/ cooing, or is it clucking, twitching to spot peace." Highly recommended for contemporary poetry collections.Karla Huston, Appleton Art Ctr., WI

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