Mars Being Red

Bell, Marvin

ISBN 10: 1556592574 / ISBN 13: 9781556592577

Published by Copper Canyon Press, 2007

May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G1556592574I4N00

Synopsis:

“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.

About the Author: Marvin Bell, author of fifteen volumes of poetry and prose, is a distinguished poet and influential teacher who for the past 35 years has served as a faculty member at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 2000, the State of Iowa named him its first Poet Laureate.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Mars Being Red
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: 2007
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket