What is the Grass

Effortlessly blending biography, criticism, and memoir, prize-winning poet Mark Doty explores his personal quest for Walt Whitman

Doty is an extraordinarily fine writer whose every word sings on the page… There certainly couldn’t be a more appropriate explorer [of Whitman] than Doty, as both a leading North American poet and a memoirist and prose writer of exceptional grace and depth… This is an exceptional, passionate memoir of reading, and of a poet’s lifelong work of understanding self and the world.

Mark Doty's deeply personal love letter to Walt Whitman, belongs in the pantheon...beside Ted Hughes’s Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being and Don Paterson’s Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets… As admirers of his poetry and memoirs will know, Doty writes about his life with a rare warmth and candour. He makes you lean forward to listen… He reads with care, in the sense of both attentiveness and love.

Marvellous. He sends you straight back to the text, makes you feel like you're returning to an old love... In a fit of enchantment.

Doty is one of the most compelling modern singers of 'the body electric' and in What is the Grass he has produced an elegant meditation on the great founding father of American poetry... Doty helps us feel the touch and connection of great art afresh. It is a warmly affecting performance.

Mark Doty has written a warm and intelligent account of Whitman... [Doty's] poems are a highly engaging mixture of the quotidian and the numinous.

Mark Doty is the author of more than ten volumes of poetry and three memoirs. His many honours include the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and, in the UK, the T. S. Eliot Prize. He is a professor at Rutgers University and lives in New York City.

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. Doty’s answer is to explore spaces tied to Whitman’s life and spaces where he finds the poet’s ghost, meditating on desire, love, and the mysterious wellsprings of the poet’s enduring work. How does a voice survive death? What Is the Grass is a conversation across time and space, a study of the astonishment one poet finds in the accomplishment of another, and an attempt to grasp Whitman’s deeply hopeful vision of humanity.

My Alexandria

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.

Deep Lane

A frank and fearless new collection from the winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize

Deep Lane, [Doty’s] best work yet, is astute, contemplative and deeply moving.

Mark Doty’s ninth collection displays his customary gift for emphatic observation, collapsing the distance between poet and subject to establish an observance of both secular and sexual mysteries.

Full of urban romanticism, with images of delving and desire and the search for “the wild unsayable”, mixed in with wonderings about his parents.

The collection is permeated with a sense of finding depth, travelling downward and into roots.

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: 
 
Down there the little star-nosed engine of desire 
at work all night, secretive: in the morning 
 
a new line running across the wet grass, near the surface, 
 
like a vein. Don’t you wish the road of excess 
led to the palace of wisdom, wouldn’t that be nice? 
 
Deep Lane is a book of descents: into the earth beneath the garden, into the dark substrata of a life. But these poems seek repair, finally, through the possibilities that sustain the speaker above ground: gardens and animals; the pleasure of seeing; the world tuned by the word. Time and again, an image of immolation and sacrifice is undercut by the fierce fortitude of nature: nature that is not just a solace but a potent antidote and cure. Ranging from agony to rapture, from great depths to hard-won heights, these are poems of grace and nobility.

Atlantis

The devastating follow-up to My Alexandria, winner of the 1995 T.S. Eliot prize, by a writer who has since won many awards and become one of the greatest American poets of his generation.

In his latest book, Atlantis, a collection of magnificent acts of attention, Mark Doty has found an ancient, radiant world within ours. Like the vanished continent of Atlantis, the present he occupies is submerged in loss. But is is luminous, a land bridge between the world of life and death...sublime, immediate, disappearing

Doty is a land of plenty, his poems celebrate abundance

The American poet Mark Doty dissents from the assumption that a plain style is more truthful than an elaborate one. Some poets are hypnotised by language and get caught flat-footed, but Doty is witty and quick... Wonderful

Doty's poetry mixes acute observation with an astute ear to create lines that not only luxuriate in their own beauty but also have a sense of real urgency. Scintillating and searing, he seems to have created a new poetic form; a synthesis of emotional power and linguistic experiment

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 whose memory he must keep alive at the same time that he is forced to renounce its hold on him. Atlantis recedes, just as the lives of those Doty loves continue to be extinguished by the devastation of AIDS. Doty's struggle is to reconcile with, and even to celebrate the evanescence of our earthly connections - and to understand how we can love more at the very moment that we must consent to let go. 
 
Atlantis is a work of astounding maturity and grace, and it will further the already extraordinary reputation of this poet who seeks - and finds - redemption in his brilliant and courageous poems.

Sweet Machine

Why should we read Doty? Because he is the finest American poet of the last twenty years, the most forceful and inventive versifier to appear in print since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977.

Having published the first poem and the last, I thought - having read the old poems too - I had known what to expect, but the senses are always new, and Doty's loyalty to them, and to the sense they make, continues to astonish, to enlighten, to console.

Mark Doty is a master, re-painting our sad daily canvas, heightening the gold light, the diffusion, the shocked shattered glass and the artificial bath of attitude, letting us see it all arrayed, as he says, under the 'uncompromising vault of heaven.

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 Third Avenue or turtles on Broadway, these are exquisite, transcendent hymns of praise: sensuous, brilliant and thrillingly alive.

Theories and Apparitions

The latest collection of poetry by the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize and author of the critically-acclaimed My Alexandria.

Doty's impressive range of gifts are all on show here

Doty's ability to meditate on the profound moments in life that co-exist in seemingly mundane situations is inspirational

Doty's new collection is immensely enjoyable, and as technically rich as ever

Succinct and moving... Effortlessly done, condensing his soul searching into neat and beautiful soundbites

Moving, splendidly observant, and unflinching, Mark Doty's poems extend the range of the American lyric poem

A new book of poems - or of anything - by Mark Doty is good news in a dark time. The precision, daring, scope, elegance of his compassion and of the language in which he embodies it are a reassuring pleasure

In this, his eighth book of poetry, Mark Doty's subjects - our mortal situation, the evanescent beauty of the world, desire's transformative power and poetry's ability to give shape to human lives - echo and develop. The first poem, 'Pipistrelle', is a typically eloquent disquisition on the art of communication prompted by the flight of a bat - 'an inky signature too fast to trace' - and is followed by an extraordinary series of meditations and variations on this theme. 
 
The poet listens to cicadas, to Handel, to the calling of birds, to Juan the loquacious Mexican taxi driver; he steeps himself in the colour and incident of the streets and subways of New York City; he goes for a never-ending chi-gong massage and is visited by the shades of Berryman and Whitman. 
 
As the images accumulate and cohere, guided by Doty's unique style - both plainspoken and sophisticated, both wry and profound - we arrive at a new understanding of the way we live and the world we live in. He shows us what we love and its magnificent fragility - that 'the house of beauty is a house of flames' - and we see, once again, why he is regarded as one of America's most recognisable and most significant poets.

Firebird

A brilliant, bittersweet memoir of growing up gay by the prize-winning poet

This is the story of a ten-year-old in top hat, cane and a red chiffon scarf, interrupted while belting out Judy Garland's 'Get Happy' by an alarmed mother at the bedroom door exclaiming, in shame and exasperation: 'Son, you're a boy.'A self-confessed 'chubby smart bookish sissy with glasses and a Southern accent', Mark Doty grew up on the move, the family following his father's engineering work across America - from Memphis to Tucson to Titusville, Florida and Northern California. With his rebellious sister already heading for abortions, carnie jobs, credit-card fraud and prison, and his fragile, artistic mother slowly drinking herself to death, Mark has quite enough troubles without discovering that his dawning sexuality is The Wrong One. Attracted not to baseball gloves or space travel but to textiles and opera, theatre and free-form dance, his confusion and fear are shared by those around him, as he makes his way into the world to the sound of Petula Clark singing 'Downtown'. After experiments with drugs, psychedelia and heterosexuality he reaches the age of majority and finally acknowledges and accepts the ten-year-old Judy Garland in himself: that he is a gay man, emerging, radiant and new, from his own ashes. It is a triumphant transformation

A Memoir

Heaven's Coast

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 medical care and the exhausting - and occasionally uplifting - burden of caring for the dying at home.

Mark Doty

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, loyalty and love inspiring him when all else fails.

Mark Doty

Books by Mark Doty

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