In What Is the Grass, Doty―a poet, a gay man, a New Yorker, and an American―keeps company with Whitman and his mutable, landmark work, Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the legendary poet’s life and work.
With School of the Arts, Mark Doty's darkly graceful seventh collection, the poet reinvents his own voice at midlife, finding his way through a troubled passage. At once witty and disconsolate—formally inventive, acutely attentive, insistently alive—this is a book of fierce vulnerability that explores the ways in which we are educated by the implacable powers of time and desire in a world that constantly renews itself.
This bold, wide-ranging collection—Doty's sixth book of poems—demonstrates the unmistakable lyricism, fierce observation, and force of feeling that have made Mark Doty's poems special to readers on both sides of the Atlantic. The poems in Source deepen Doty's exploration of the paradox of selfhood. They offer a complex, boldly colored self-portrait; their muscular lines argue fiercely with the fact of limit; they pulse with the drama of perception and the quest to forge meaning.
From Mark Doty, one of our finest poets, a delicate and sensual literary essay. Part memoir, part art history, part meditation, this hybrid volume uses the great Dutch still life paintings of the seventeenth century as a departure point for an examination of questions about our relationships with things, how we invest them with human store, how they hold feeling and hope and history within them.
