Reviews
Counting (2023)
Dan Bellm honors the practice of counting: counting time down, counting time forward. And he engages his readers in the practice of marking our moments, and our moment, with unaccountable grace.
- Forrest Hamer
Central American Book of the Dead, by Balam Rodrigo (2023)
Balam Rodrigo’s book is a retelling of Bartolomé de las Casas’ A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, but remixed to show us that the colonial machinery is still very much at work in the “fertile burying ground called Mexico.” With Dan Bellm’s brilliant translation, the book becomes the very country where these atrocities take place.
- Javier Zamora
“Newly born from death,” these voices, these bodies, refuse to vanish from the face of the earth. Each voice is haunting, inerasable. Dan Bellm’s translations are as intimate as whispered conversations around a kitchen table. Balam Rodrigo’s poetic gifts are mind-blowing: in this singular book, they ignite into a blazing chorus.
- Eduardo C. Corral
This book will haunt you, as well it should.
- Rosa Alcalá
A book as daring as the migrants who undertake the perilous journey north.
- Roberto Lovato
Deep Well (2017)
Dan Bellm's Deep Well is 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.
- David St. John
The polished stones of the stanza—all unrhymed tercets, haiku-like syllables of 5/7/5, with language pure as a meditation bell—are Bellm’s useful masonry for contemplating a subject both fathomless and keenly felt: the loss and the life of his mother. All of Bellm’s poems are poignant for their particulars; they are also containers for a larger truth that any grown child comes to know. We were once one with our mothers, and some part of them will always be unknowable to us.
- Jen Hinst-White, Image
Practice (2008)
Reading Dan Bellm's poems, I think: This is blessing … I am in awe of how Bellm's poems perform a dance with and against Holy Scripture. Practice is like a long prayer of wonder, gratitude, pain and loss and tenderness.
- Alicia Ostriker
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 … Bellm 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.
- Ilya Kaminsky
Buried Treasure (1999)
This stunning book is fiercely alive, and awake to the self as both singular and inextricably part of the whole—to the body as one in a field of yearning and failing human forms. “Delle Avenue” is—and I don't say this lightly—a 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 on 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.
- Mark Doty
One Hand on the Wheel (1999)
Singular, fresh...[Dan Bellm] is an American artist of enormous gifts and discipline.
- June Jordan
Dan Bellm's courageous and humane poems are a strong inauguration for the California Poetry Series. A very fine book.
- Adrienne Rich
Terrain (1998)
This chorale book, with its three substantive and distinctive voices, is rich proof of the strength and variety of current poetry, and of poetry-born friendship as well. Drawn from widely differing lives which nonetheless come together in a web of shared concerns, these poems range from the elegiac to the unnerving to the celebratory. Page after page offers the thrilling lift of revelation: imaginative, sensuous and precise encounters with the real terrain of the human. This is a truly fine collection.
- Jane Hirshfield