As its title—These Green-Going-to-Yellow—indicates, Marvin Bell's new book is concerned with aging, decay, mutability, mortality. Its central metaphor, tenuously and enticingly attached to the speaker of the poems, is illness…. The sense of illness is not limited to the speaker, nor to humanity in general, but permeates the natural world as well….

[The] poems tend to be relatively long, meditative, accumulative, even discursive. When the method works well, as it does on four or five notable occasions, the results are outstanding. Perhaps the best poem in the book is "Birds Who Nest in the Garage."… (p. 677)

The construction of this poem is obviously loose; some would call it rambling. The line between success and failure in such structures is a fine one. In "Birds Who Nest in the Garage," success is achieved by the use of not just one but two technical elements that appear consistently...