num_pages: 80
description: “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 . . . I am, like you, a witnessto 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 eyesto whom time happened. I lived in stormy weatherwriting songs of love because, tell meif 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.
language: English
title: Mars Being Red
titlecomplete: Mars Being Red
genres: Poetry
ratings_count: 72
publisher: Copper Canyon Press