Incarnate: The Collected Dead Man Poems - Softcover

Bell, Marvin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556595832 ISBN 13: 9781556595837

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2019

Synopsis

The Dead Man, Marvin Bell's brilliant poetic invention, is an overarching consciousness, alive and dead at once, defeating time. Mystical and anonymous, The Dead Man offers searing insight into the joys, as well as the catastrophes, of fluctuating cultural and political moments. Incarnate draws from all of Bell's previous collections where The Dead Man appeared, and adds an abundant cache of new poems that resonate with "the dark matter and sticky stuff" of life. As David St. John writes in his introduction, "No voice in our poetry has spoken with more eloquence and wisdom of the daily spiritual, political and psychological erosion in our lives; no poet has gathered our American experience with a more capacious tenderness--all the while naming and celebrating our persistent hopes and enduring human desires....Remarkable for its eclectic and culturally diverse vision, Incarnate embodies a vivid world of poetic reflection unlike anything else in American poetry."

About this title

Review:

"Marvin Bell's Dead Man poems should close out any anthology of the twentieth century and open any anthology of this new century's work. They change the game. They insist that we pay a new and different kind of attention." --The Georgia Review

"His poems are philosophical, concerned most often with the pairing of life and death, which he ponders with a reliable frankness and, over the years, an increasing sense of liberation." --Booklist

"A book to make our aches more pointed, to give them a deeper sense of purpose... In our troubled times, one could do much worse than to be a companion to Marvin Bell's Dead Man."
--Kenyon Review

"[Dead Man poems] are by turns cosmic and earthy, dubious and faithful, determined and resigned. Deeply funny and comically humane, they remind us that life in this world embraces contraries." --Pleiades

"With the rhythms of a modern-day prophet, Bell creates a universe of one, recasting Whitman's 'Song of Myself' to mirror the present age."--Publishers Weekly

About the Author:

Marvin Bell was born in New York City 1937, and raised in rural Long Island. He attended Alfred University and the University of Chicago. He enjoyed a long teaching career at the University of Iowa, where he influenced generations of poets and was the Flannery O'Connor Professor of Letters. Bell has published twenty-one volumes of poetry and served as Iowa's first Poet Laureate. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa and Port Townsend, Washington.

About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1556595832
• ISBN 13: 9781556595837
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288