Showing results for "mark doty"

"It sounds like a simple thing, to say what you see," Mark Doty begins. "But try to find words for the shades of a mottled sassafras leaf, or the reflectivity of a bay on an August morning, or the very beginnings of desire stirring in the gaze of someone looking right into your eyes . . ." Doty finds refuge in the sensory experience found in poems by Blake, Whitman, Bishop, and others. The Art of Description is an invaluable book by one of America's most revered writers and teache...

An account of the poet author's love affair with Dutch art, and the consolations and ecstasies of the objects we gather on our way through life. We begin standing in the Met in front of a painting by Jan Davidsz de Heem: Still Life with Oysters and Lemon. Looking almost more closely than we can bear at this image from the 17th century, Doty attempts to tell us everything it holds, from pigments to forms, and above all, meaning.This confrontation with beauty is one of many ...

Mark Doty brings the vitality and imagination that illuminate his own work to his selections for the twenty-fifth volume in the Best American Poetry series. He has chosen poems of high moral earnestness and poems in a comic register; poems that tell stories and poems that test the boundaries of innovative composition. This landmark edition includes David Lehman’s keen look at American poetry in his foreword, Mark Doty’s gorgeous introduction, and notes from the po...

Why do dogs speak so profoundly to our inner lives?When Mark Doty decides to adopt a dog as a companion for his dying partner, he finds himself bringing home Beau, a large golden retriever, malnourished and in need of loving care, to join Arden, the black retriever. As Beau bounds back to life, the two dogs become Mark Doty's companions, his solace, and eventually the very life force that keeps him from abandoning all hope during the darkest days - their tenacity, ...

November 22, 1963, is a date that will forever live in the minds and hearts of those who were witness to or touched by the assassination of Pres. John F. Kennedy in Dealey Plaza. Surprisingly, the majority of sites associated with events surrounding that day still stand along the streets and in the neighborhoods of the greater Dallas�Fort Worth region. From Fort Worth�s Hotel Texas to the Texas Theater and the Old Municipal Building in Dallas, John F. Kennedy Sites in Dallas�Fort Worth exp...

HEAVEN'S COAST is an anatomy of loss: tender, heartbreaking, consoling and, ultimately, incredibly moving. Beginning with the first onset of AIDS and its lengthening shadow over a blissful relationship, the book follows the shifting patterns between two loves as the illness takes hold - the change in them and the change in the way they perceive the world, through the lens of grief. Doty examines the nature of AIDS as opposed to other illnesses, the responses of society, the frustration of ...

Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman’s bold, new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul and what it means to be a self. In What Is the Grass, Doty – a poet, a lover of men, 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.What is it, then, between us? Whitman asks. D...

My Alexandria comprises a series of eloquent meditations on the essential themes: mortality and life, beauty and loss. The collection is haunted by the spectre of AIDS, but is transfigured by Mark Doty's ranging imagination, effortless stylistic skill and huge emotional power.

The three books that brought Mark Doty acclaim - the poetry collections My Alexandria and Atlantis, and the prose memoir Heaven's Coast - dealt unflinchingly with love and its loss. The poems in this new book are from a man transfigured and elevated by grief, and the tone throughout is one of celebration at the majesty, the impossible splendour of the living world. Whether the subject is golden retrievers or humpback whales, Delft tiles or Murano glass, lilacs on...

Mark Doty’s poetry has long been celebrated for its risk and candour, an ability to find transcendent beauty even in the mundane and grievous, an unflinching eye that – as Philip Levine says – ‘looks away from nothing’. In the poems of Deep Lane the stakes are higher: there is more to lose than ever before, and there is more for us to gain. ‘Pure appetite,’ he writes ironically early in the collection, ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that.’ And the following poem answers:D...

When Mark Doty's My Alexandria was published in 1993, the response was one of unanimous celebration. Writing with unmatched technical virtuosity and stunning honesty Doty never flinches from his subject - how we live when what we live for is about to be taken from us - and the poems collected in My Alexandria revealed powerfully the inextricable connection between communion and loss.In Atlantis, Doty claims the mythical lost island as his own: a paradise ...

In the traditional of great literary manifestos, Norton is proud to present this powerful work by Adrienne Rich.With passion, critical questioning, and humor, Adrienne Rich suggests how poetry has actually been lived in the world, past and present. In this essay, which was the basis for her speech upon accepting the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, she ranges among themes including poetry's disparagement as "eithe...