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Article: Ardor: The Book of the Dead Man, Volume 2
- Article from:
- Poetry
- Article date:
- August 1, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Modern Poetry Association Aug 1998. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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Ardor: The Book of the Dead Man, Volume 2, by Marvin Bell. Copper Canyon Press. $14.00.
Marvin Bell's gnomic Ardor, a continuation of his Book of the Dead Man (I994), builds on the same rhetorical gambit the poet adopted for his earlier volume-that of extended definition. Bell takes as the sequence's primary prosodic unit the line, each a complete sentence, e.g., "The dead man is slag ash soot cinders grime powder embers . . ." or, more jocundly cryptic, "Like a duck's foot, the dead man contains four wishes." Despite the irrepressible litany of attributes and activities that make up these poems, the phenomenon of Bell's dead man proves as slippery to the grasp as Lorca's renowned duende ...