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Sweet Machine

Sweet Machine

Summary

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.

Reviews

  • 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.
    Michael Glover, New Statesman

About the author

Mark Doty

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.
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