Doty, Mark

Doty, Mark

Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems

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  • Author(s): Doty, Mark
  • Publisher / Date: Harper, 2008

Professor Mark Doty's Fire to Fire collects work from Mark Doty's seven books of poetry, along with a generous selection of new work. Doty's subjects—our mortal situation, the evanescent beauty of the world, desire's transformative power, and art's ability to give shape to human lives—echo and develop across twenty years of poems. His signature style encompasses both the plainspoken and the artfully wrought; here, one of contemporary American poetry's most lauded, recognizable voices speaks to the crises and possibilities of our times.

Dog Years: A Memoir

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  • Author(s): Doty, Mark
  • Publisher / Date: Harper Collins, 2007

Professor Mark Doty, an award-winning memoirist and poet, explores with compassion and intelligence the complicated, loving territory inhabited by devoted dogs and their loyal humans. In 1994, when the author's longtime lover was dying of AIDS, beloved pet Arden kept the surviving partner afloat. A new adoptee, the rambunctious Beau, in his "sloppy dog way," becomes a part of the tribe and carries some of the burden of grief. Doty says Beau "carried something else for me too, which was my will to live." In a time of devastating pain, as well as in happier times, Doty's two dogs are the "secret heroes of my own vitality." The dog characters in the book are irresistible and the arcs of their lives are delineated with the tenderness and passion of the truly smitten. Arden's quiet nobility and slow decline breaks the heart, while Beau's goofy enthusiasm peaks with youth and mellows in illness. With a marvelous ability to present the pain of mourning with a poet's delicate hand and an irrepressible instinct for joy, Doty delivers a soulful love story which illuminates no less than the big human mysteries: attachment, death, grief, loyalty, happiness. The book nimbly sidesteps sentimentality and lands squarely on a philosophical, inquisitive tone as intellectually evocative as it is emotionally resonant.

Atlantis

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  • Author(s): Doty, Mark
  • Publisher / Date: Harper Perennial, 1995

In Atlantis, Professor Mark Doty claims the mythical lost island as his own: a fading 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. Set in the harbor village of Provincetown, whose charming, cluttered landscape Doty brings to life, the collection chronicles the illness and death of Doty's beloved partner, as well as many others whose worlds have been both ravaged and broadened by this disease. Doty's struggle is to reconcile with, and even to celebrate, the evanescence of our earthly connections—to those we love, to the shifting physical landscape, even to our strongest feelings—and to understand how we can love more at the very moment that we must consent to let go.

My Alexandria

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  • Author(s): Doty, Mark
  • Publisher / Date: University of Illinois Press, 1993

Professor Mark Doty masterfully tackles themes of death, beauty and discovery in this collection. In "Days of 1981," he recalls the memory of his first gay lover—a sculptor he met in a bar. "Nothing was promised, nothing sustained / or lethal offered. I wish I'd kept the heart. / Even the emblems of our own embarrassment / become acceptable to us, after a while." My Alexandria, Doty's third collection of poetry, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 1993.