[From A Probable Volume of Dreams through The Escape into You and Residue of Song]—the three most important books of Marvin Bell which have been published so far—we discover the poet crafting his poems in structures which keep reminding us just how much artifice is involved, and how much wit is needed to keep the poem afloat and the reader at once near and at bay. What proves telling is seeing which poems from Bell's limited edition of Things We Dreamt We Died For … get left out of A Probable Volume of Dreams: the poems tend not merely to be the weaker ones, but the less distanced ones in which there is insufficient strategy to manage where the poet-father must walk, "foot by foot," both on earth and in heaven.

If the most recent poems of Bell, those still uncollected in book form, have begun to...