.com Review
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"I was so filled with longing / --is that what sound
is for?-- / I seemed to be nowhere at all," Mark Doty rhapsodizes
while watching geese fly in "Migratory," another double vision in
his award-winning fourth book, Atlantis. Forming a moving elegy
to the poet's lover, Wally, the individual tercets and couplets
speak in a cautious but brave rhetoric combining the best of
Frost and Bishop. The book removes its mourning clothes and goes
downtown, full of rage, to sit in the steam baths of the edgy
"Homo Will Not Inherit," in which the speaker says, "I'll tell
you what I'll inherit: the margins." Indeed, Doty's speakers are
most likely found in tidal, watery margins that indulge his
double vision of land and sea interweaving like body and spirit.
Atlantis begins merely as marshland uncovered at low tide:
Now the tide's begun
its clockwork turn, pouring, in the day's hourglass
toward the other side of the world,
and our dependable marsh reappears
...And our ongoingness,
what there'll be of us? Look,
love, the lost world
rising from the waters again:
our continent, where it always was....
This austerity lapses into sentimentality only once, when Wally
pets a dog. Yet even here, Doty delivers an aesthetic message,
that the touch "isn't about grasping / ...so much will / must be
summoned, / such attention brought / to the work--which is all /
he is now, this gesture." It is as though Wally's death has
released Doty from the uneasy assurances of earlier poems,
causing him to rediscover how life exists in metaphor, and at one
remove, the language of poetry. "Description is travel," he
writes, and like Frost in "Birches," he travels along his
metaphors, climbing until they bend and bring him back to a world
changed by the experience. Atlantis and his previous book, My
Alexandria, are valuable chronicles of sensibility and
intelligence laid bare. -- Edward Skoog
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From Library Journal
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A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
for My Alexandria, Doty offers "eloquent meditations on the
essential themes?mortality and life, beauty and loss" (LJ
4/14/93)?in poems haunted by the specter of AIDS.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Review
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"Having by his third book raised the roof of the
America Sublime, Doty is now concerned, like Clampitt before him,
to frame doors and windows, to "detail" landscapes and
outbuildings of loss which, in the ways of the Sublime, properly
circumstantiated, are transformed, transcended, redeemed. A lost
continent breaks through the surface, glistening still with
tears, but exact, vivid, "there.""-- Richard Howard"We have
already come to known Mark Doty's books as texts of passion and
exactitude. "Atlantis" is this, and more. Tragedy is at its
center--the death of Wally Roberts from AIDS, an event that takes
place within the mindless continuum of more death--even within
this book--from the ongoing AIDS plague. There is a mighty lesson
in "Atlantis" and it is this--that we are helpless before fate,
except in our demeanor. "Atlantis" is a book filled with the
striking and graceful forms of the physical world--for beauty is
the school to which Doty goes, with great courage, and certainly
without irony, for comfort, sanity, and an understanding of such
dark and bright things. Of course he finds no more than Keats
found: a riddle. It is enough. Mark Doty has written a book that
is ferocious, luminous, and important."-- Mary Oliver
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From the Back Cover
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In his latest collection, Atlantis, 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.
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About the Author
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Mark Doty's books of poetry and nonfiction prose have been
honored with numerous distinctions, including the National Book
Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Los
Angeles Times Book Prize, and, in the United Kingdom, the T. S.
Eliot Prize. In 2008, he won the National Book Award for Fire to
Fire: New and Selected Poems. He is a professor at the University
of Houston, and he lives in New York City.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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Description
My salt marsh
--mine, I call it, because
these day-hammered fields
of dazzled horizontals
undulate, summers,
inside me and out--
how can I say what it is?
Sea lavender shivers
over the tidewater steel.
A million minnows ally
with their million shadows
(lucky we'll never need
to know whose is whose).
The bud of storm loosens:
watered paint poured
dark blue onto the edge
of the page. Haloed grasses,
gilt shadow-edged body of dune. . .
I could go on like this.
I love the language
of the day's ten thousand aspects,
the creases and flecks
in the map, these
brilliant gouaches.
But I'm not so sure it's true,
what I was taught, that through
the particular's the way
to the universal:
what I need to tell is
swell and curve, shift
and blur of boundary,
tremble and spilling over,
a heady purity distilled
from detail. A metaphor, then:
in this tourist town,
the retail legions purvey
the far-flung world's
bangles: brilliance of Nepal
and Mozambique, any place
where cheap labor braids
or burnishes or hammers
found stuff into jewelry's
lush grammar,
a whole vocabulary
of ornament: copper and lacquer,
shells and seeds from backwaters
with fragrant names, millefiori
milled into African beads, Mexican abalone,
camelbone and tin, cinnabar
and verdigris, silver,
black onyx, coral,
gold: one vast conjugation
of the verb
to shine.
And that
is the marsh essence--
all the hoarded riches
of the world held
and rivering, a gleam
awakened and doubled
by water, flashing
off the bowing of the grass.
Jewelry, tides, language:
things that shine.
What is description, after all,
but encoded desire?
And if we say
the marsh, if we forge
terms for it, then isn't it
contained in us,
a little,
the brightness? Four Cut Sunflowers, One Upside Down
Turbulent stasis on a blue ground.
What is any art but static flame?
Fire of spun gold, grain.
This brilliant flickering's
arrested by named (Naples,
chrome, cadmium) and nameless
yellows, tawny golds. Look
at the ochre sprawl--how
they sprawl, these odalisques,
withering coronas
around the seedheads' intricate precision.
Even drying, the petals curling
into licks of fire,
they're haloed in the pure rush of light
yellow is. One theory of color,
before Newton broke the world
through the prism's planes
and nailed the primaries to the wheel,
posited that everything's made of yellow
and blue--coastal colors
which engender, in their coupling,
every other hue, so that the world's
an elaborated dialogue
between citron and Prussian blue.
They are a whole summer to themselves.
They are a nocturne
in argent and gold, and they burn
with the ferocity
of dying (which is to say, the luminosity
of what's living hardest). Is it a human soul
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