American poet and memoirist, Mark Doty was born in Maryville, Tennessee, and educated at Drake University and Goddard College. The only American recipient of Britain’s T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry, Doty has published nine collections; his volume Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. Nearly as prolific in prose as in verse, Doty has published five works of nonfiction, including the memoir Firebird (1999), which recalls his childhood in the South and in Arizona. In 1989 Doty’s life was profoundly altered when his partner, Wally Roberts, was diagnosed with AIDS, the subject of Doty’s memoir Heaven’s Coast (1996); Roberts’s death in 1994 is recounted in a third memoir, the bestselling Dog Years (2007). Presently Doty lives in New York City and teaches at Rutgers University.
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My AlexandriaPoemsFrom"Chanteuse"
Prendergast painted the Public Garden;
remembered, even at a little distance,
the city takes on his ravishing tones.
Jots of color resolve: massed parasols
above a glimmering pond, the transit
of almost translucent swans. Brilliant bits
- jewels? slices of sugared fruit? – bloom
into a clutch of skirts on the bridge
above the summer boaters. His city’s essence:
all the hues of chintzes or makeup
or Italian ices, all the sheen artifice
is capable of. Our city’s lavish paintbox.
My Alexandria:Poems -
My AlexandriaPoemsFrom"The Wings"
An empty pair of pants
is mortality’s severest evidence.
Embroidered mottoes blend
into something elegiac but removed;
a shirt can’t be remote.
One can’t look past
the sleeves where two arms
were, where a shoulder pushed
against a seam, and someone knew exactly
how the stitches pressed against skin
that can’t be generalized but was,
irretrievably, you, or yours.
My Alexandria:Poems -
My AlexandriaPoemsFrom"Brilliance"
Maggie’s taking care of a man
who’s dying; he’s attended to everything,
said goodbye to his parents,
paid off his credit card.
She says Why don’t you just
run it up to the limit?
but he wants everything
squared away, no balance owed,
though he misses the pets
he’s already found a home for
- he can’t be around dogs or cats,
too much risk…
My Alexandria:Poems
“Elegant, plain-spoken, and unflinching, Mark Doty’s poems . . . invite us to share their ferocious compassion.” —National Book Award, judges’ citation for Fire to Fire
“Fire to Fire should solidify Doty’s position as a star of contemporary American poetry . . . The poems combine close attention to the fragile, contingent things of the world with the constant, almost unavoidable chance of transcendence.” —Reginald Shepherd, Publishers Weekly
“[Doty] uses language as a way to highlight a moment, elevate it, and unearth hidden depth and meaning . . . Striking imagery and a powerful imagination are two of his best tools . . .” —Christian Science Monitor
Selected Works
