Marvin Bell's ninth major collection of poems is groundbreaking, his most provocative and imaginative work to date. The phrase "the dead man" resounds throughout like a drumbeat registering the wisdom and genius of ignorance, fallibility, and mutability with a Zen-like detachment. Defying paraphrase, Bell's new poems demand to be understood in the context of the incantatory line as he illuminates the transcendent inscape in its moment of self-revelation. "The Book of the Dead Man" demolishes boundaries between lyric poetry and serio-comic intensity, and announces a poetics of striking spiritual candor. Marvin Bell's stunning new poems address and redefine--and ultimately embrace--aging, entropy, abundance, error, comedy, and horror in the active life. Composed with an elastic line, the poems of "Ardor" transcend time and place, breaking down distinctions between notions of living and dying, transcribing a life lived at the fingertips. Bell reinvigorates the quotidian by bearing witness in a voice by turns surreal, questioning, outrageous and deadpan, but always incisive, returning inevitably to love as the paradigm: "The dead man's thought is visceral and unconditional, love as it was intended when the river met the shore."