What strikes one immediately about Marvin Bell's wonderful new book, These Green-Going-to-Yellow … is the sense of quiet that pervades them and the deceptive understatement of nearly every poem. Even more than Bell's previous book, Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See, his new collection offers poems that express their fluent and steady peace with the world.

Although many of the poems in These Green-Going-to-Yellow are set in distant locales—Hawaii, Tangier, Alaska, Cuba, Italy, Spain, France—they seek not to appropriate the exotica of their surroundings but to recognize the dailiness and immediacy, yet intrinsic otherness, of their settings. (p. 227)

Throughout this volume, Bell has chosen a more straightforward and unadorned diction, a diction capable of becoming alternately reflective and immediate. Yet there is still the verbal play and sly wit, the marvelous turns and reversals familiar to readers of Bell's earlier books. Because the poems in...