Description
Book Synopsis“Elegant, plain-spoken, and unflinching, Mark Doty’s poems . . . invite us to share their ferocious compassion.”—National Book Award, judges’ citation for
Fire to FireTrade Review"Doty remains elegiac and continues to attend to beauty. He also does some of his best work yet as a nature poet." -- Publishers Weekly
"This collection will win awards." -- Maggie Galehouse - Houston Chronicle
"Doty is able to weave philosophical inquiry, personal anecdote, and awe at people and nature into a voice that is simultaneously warm and tinged with a useful measure of doubt." -- Craig Morgan Teicher - NPR
"His best work yet…astute, contemplative and deeply moving." -- Elizabeth Lund - Washington Post
"Mark Doty writes with absolute exactitude, with one eye on the ideal or absolute and one on the real; the ghost of Walt Whitman on one hand, and a laundromat on 16th Street in New York on the other. There is not a finer, more delicate, more sublime poet writing today in the English language. It’s a poet’s job to show us what we knew but never saw before; and it’s a poet’s job to tell us over and over what love is. Doty is this poet." -- Gerald Stern
"One of the things that has been constant about Mark Doty’s work, poetry and prose, is his intense search for the exact word or phrase, of whatever issue, which leads him (and us) into the very furnace of meaning within the human story. It might be the color of the inside of a shell of a mussel found on the beach; it might be the recognition that the heart that feels close to dying might not die, if the will can be fed just a little." -- Mary Oliver
"Mark Doty’s most representative poems are tender, intimate, open, and true. They have their roots in the essential dailiness of this life, with its ritual round of small duties and encounters, and they open out . . . into a world of embracing sympathy, camaraderie, and understanding. With his clarity of vision and great heart, Doty stands among us an emblematic and shining presence." -- Stanley Kunitz
"When Mark Doty begins one of his extraordinary
Deep Lane poems with ‘Into Eden came the ticks,’ not only the ticks of the natural world but the ticking of the underworld come to mind. Doty has never ceased searching everywhere for truth and awe, two words that constitute a definition of revelation. The perfect avatar for this brilliant book’s revelatory wonders may well be ‘a deer’s head floating in the bay, wreathed with flowers.’ Deep Lane is earthly, unearthly, and even when brutal, beautiful. These are sensational new poems." -- Terrance Hayes
