ISBN 978-1-944884-16-1 <\/p>\n Other Buying Options: Small Press Distribution<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Deep Well<\/em><\/strong>, Dan\u00a0Bellm<\/span>\u2019s fourth collection of poems, is an extended homage and elegy for a mother lost to Alzheimer\u2019s Disease in 2010. The sequence is a book of memory and consolation, combining formal precision with plain speech, and interwoven with\u00a0Bellm<\/span>\u2019s translations of six related poems from Spanish and French. Poet David St. John writes, \u201cThese lyrics of\u00a0memoriam<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0and these deep songs (in Lorca’s sense) of mourning seem almost to etch themselves onto the air. Keep this book at hand; hold its passages close. This is an essential collection of poetry.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n With a touch on the keys of language as light as the air we breathe, Dan Bellm traces his mother’s death, and abides her continuing presence, as the keeper of “this\/ blessing of kindness” which is both hers and his.\u00a0Deep Well<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0is a book of the purest poetry I have read in a long time. I am grateful for it. <\/p>\n Dan Bellm’s\u00a0Deep Well<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0is a breathtaking, constantly astonishing elegiac sequence of poems in honor of his mother. Reflecting upon both the power of her presence in his life and the deepening grief of watching her passage through Alzheimer’s, Dan Bellm both celebrates the fierce integrity of this remarkable woman and quietly charts his own poetics of loss. These lyrics of memoriam and these deep songs (in Lorca’s sense) of mourning seem almost to etch themselves onto the air. Keep this book at hand; hold its passages close. This is an essential collection of poetry. <\/p>\n Speaking through the wound of grief, Dan Bellm reaches to the most sorrowful depth of first consciousness and clarity, a true\u00a0infans<\/em><\/strong>, a state before words, one that can neither laugh nor cry except in\u00a0innocentia<\/em><\/strong>, the inability to harm. Few humans, even few poets, can preserve such a state. Dan Bellm is one of them. This\u00a0Deep Well<\/em><\/strong>, this wide-ranging metaphor for the one who taught him to love writing, conveys a trust and a faith in sacred words that carry the “undying tremor and draw” Seamus Heaney compared to water far down a well. <\/p>\n Wrought in a series of delicately articulated three-line stanzas\u2014as if each stanza is a meditation on the relationship between the mother, the son, and the spirit\u2014Dan Bellm’s poems have worked some sort of magic on my heart. Reading\u00a0Deep Well<\/em><\/strong>, I am at once sad and elated, aware of righteous indignation and far-reaching compassion. The poems here are part of a conversation that knows no boundaries. Neither foreign languages nor national borders, not denials nor death, can hinder these urgent and universal utterances. I am grateful to\u00a0Deep Well<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0for its precise and profound translation of what it means to inherit this lot that our language calls love. <\/p>\n In\u00a0Deep Well<\/strong>,<\/em>\u00a0Dan Bellm writes the poems none of us ever wants to have to write, on watching a parent die, and he does it with a sense of beauty and wonder that, in spite of the suffering, leaves the reader in awe of life: \u201cHer voice came\/ from the bottom and\/\/ returned me to the\/ surface; it showed a way back\/ to breath. <\/p>\n Dan\u00a0Bellm<\/span>\u00a0transcends the expected in every poem of\u00a0Deep Well<\/em><\/strong>.\u00a0 Nuanced, lyrical and\u00a0reaching ever\u00a0deeper\u00a0beneath\u00a0the ground,\u00a0this collection is\u00a0Bellm<\/span>‘s best yet. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Page after page offers the thrilling lift of revelation\u2014imaginative, sensuous and precise encounters with the real terrain of the human. This is a truly fine collection. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Courageous and humane poems\u2026.A very fine book. <\/p>\n Singular, fresh\u2026[Dan Bellm] is an American artist of enormous gifts and discipline. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n This stunning book is fiercely alive, and awake to the self as both singular and inextricably part of the whole\u2014to the body as one in a field of yearning and failing human forms. “Delle Avenue” is\u2014and I don’t say this lightly\u2014a great poem of city life, of the confluence of memory and history and voice which city streets are. Dan Bellm’s genuine authority and his vulnerable, almost physical presence of the page lead us, somehow, to connection with what is larger, more ongoing, than any single person is; he sings the anxious and lovely story of his place and time. <\/p>\n Whether he is looking at a small town, a hip neighborhood or the inner city, Dan Bellm regards American life with honesty, pity, and acceptance. He invokes the spirits of the poet James Schuyler and the composer John Cage, and the blessing they provide him is that, like them, Bellm scorns nothing. He can make poetry out of the ordinary grief of his parents’ lives or the unlikely details of a shabby city street. He finds a connection between artistic ambition and the evolutionary stubbornness of quaking aspens. He has not forgotten his childhood, even as he struggles with being a parent. These poems range widely, giving us both the big picture of our time and place and the personal situation carrying on modestly within it. This poet’s gift–and I think it is a substantial one–is for heartbreaking accuracy.\u00a0 <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Reading Dan Bellm’s poems, I think: This is blessing. I think of Auden saying, “In the deserts of the heart \/ Let the healing fountain start.” I am in awe of how Bellm’s poems perform a dance with and against Holy Scripture. And I keep coming back to his lines about “the way the body addresses the soul \/ lending it shape \/ lending it comfort and sorrow.” Practice<\/em> <\/strong>is like a long prayer of wonder, gratitude, pain and loss and tenderness. <\/p>\n Something happened to Dan Bellm in this third book that I believe will propel him most deservingly as one of the foremost poets of his generation. Here, speaking the language of the prophets, revising it in a way that is both humble and heartbreakingly playful\u2014remember Yeats’s “It is myself that I remake?”\u2014Bellm achieves a quiet grandeur that casts a spell and does not let me be. I love Practice as a book-long sequence of parables, prayers, elegies, and incantations that are traditional and yet utterly contemporary. In assembling this formal collection, Bellm teaches us: We are living in biblical times. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Cover art:\u00a0Landscape Abstraction<\/em><\/strong>, by Jane Freilicher, oil on linen, 1960. Private collection. Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dan Bellm
\n 116 pages: $16.00
\n March, 2017
\n (Pulitzer Prize Nominee)<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n
\nPraise for Dan Bellm and\u00a0Deep Well<\/em><\/h3>\n
\n —\u00a0Alicia Ostriker<\/strong>, author of\u00a0Waiting for the Light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n
\n —\u00a0David St. John<\/strong>, author of\u00a0The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n
\n —\u00a0Pura L\u00f3pez Colom\u00e9<\/strong>, author of\u00a0Via Corporis<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n
\n —\u00a0Camille T. Dungy<\/strong>, author of\u00a0Trophic Cascade<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n
\n \u2014\u00a0Mark Statman<\/strong><\/a>, author of\u00a0That Train Again<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n
\n —\u00a0Idra Novey,<\/strong>\u00a0author of\u00a0Ways to Disappear<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n
\nfor\u00a0Terrain<\/em>, with Molly Fisk and Forrest Hamer (1998)<\/h3>\n
\n —\u00a0Jane Hirshfield<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nfor\u00a0One Hand on the Wheel<\/em>\u00a0(1999)<\/h3>\n
\n —\u00a0Adrienne Rich<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n —\u00a0June Jordan<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nfor\u00a0Buried Treasure<\/em>\u00a0(1999)<\/h3>\n
\n —Mark Doty<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n —\u00a0Mark Jarman<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nfor\u00a0Practice<\/em>\u00a0(2008)<\/h3>\n
\n —\u00a0Alicia Ostriker<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n —\u00a0Ilya Kaminsky<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n
\n 9781944884161
\n …the purest poetry I have read in a long time. \u2014Alicia Ostriker<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":186,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[16],"product_tag":[95,18],"class_list":{"0":"post-185","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"product_cat-lavender-ink","7":"product_tag-dan-bellm","8":"product_tag-poetry","10":"first","11":"instock","12":"taxable","13":"shipping-taxable","14":"purchasable","15":"product-type-simple","16":"berocket_lgv_grid","17":"berocket_lgv_list_grid"},"yoast_head":"\n