Marvin Bell – författare

"Marvin Bell has the largest heart since Walt Whitman."—Harvard Review

"One of our finest and most acclaimed poets."—Booklist

"Charged with making the darkness visible, Bell''s ''Dead Man'' sometimes glows with an eerily illuminating light."—Publishers Weekly

Marvin Bell is one of America''s great poets, and his legacy includes the invention of a startling poetic form called the "Dead Man" poems. The Dead Man is alive and dead at once: not a persona, but an overarching consciousness, embedded in poetics and philosophy. Vertigo is the latest from the Dead Man—a brilliant, enigmatic, wise, and wild book.

The dead man stands still, waiting for the boomerang to—you know.He hears the words of philosophers ricochet among chasms and     disappear in the far away.His scent goes forth, his old skin, hair and nails, and he spits, too.He leans forward to look backward, and the ancient world reappears.It is the beginning, when mountains, canyons and seas were new,before the moon had eyes, before paper, before belief.Anything he says now are souvenirs of the future…

Marvin Bell has published seventeen books of poetry and has received numerous honors, including the Lamont Award and Senior Fulbright appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia. He taught for forty years at the Iowa Writers'' Workshop, and was the first State Poet of Iowa. He lives in Iowa and Washington.

“Marvin Bell has the largest heart since Walt Whitman.”—Harvard Review

In a recent interview Marvin Bell said, “I’ve been trying for thirty years to figure out how best to put the news into poems—what other people would call politics. But there are some hairy aesthetic questions connected to overtly political poems.”

Mars Being Red is the most political book of Bell’s storied career—and one of his most beautiful. Infuriated by our country’s military aggression and destructive politics, Bell asks, What shall we do, we who are at war but are asked / to pretend we are not? What Bell has done is craft a book of urgency and insight, anger and action:

. . . I am, like you, a witness to the coffins that were Viet Nam and Iraq, to a political machine that came up three lemons . . . I am the big ears and the wide eyes to whom time happened. I lived in stormy weather writing songs of love because, tell me if you know, who can help it?

Marvin Bell served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for over thirty years. He is the first and current poet laureate of Iowa.