Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems
Mark Doty, . . HarperCollins, $22.95 (325pp) ISBN 978-0-06-075247-7
Doty's first book,
Doty's poetic career really took off with
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Doty has never eschewed beauty. Indeed, beauty, its unlikely, often unexpected, yet constant recurrence and its elusive fleetingness, is central, as demonstrated by several new poems titled “Theory of Beauty,” each with a parenthetical specific occasion. Beauty is found everywhere in Doty's poems, in a band playing cast-off chemical drums in Times Square, even in Chet Baker falling from an Amsterdam hotel window: “a blur of buds//breathing in the lindens/and you let go and why not.”
The title poem “Fire to Fire,” from
At times the poems unnecessarily explain what their vivid images and striking phrases makes clear, but the commitment to the particular, and to its possibilities, is unwavering. As Doty writes in “Ararat,” “Any small thing can save you.” The poems combine close attention to the fragile, contingent things of the world with the constant, almost unavoidable chance of transcendence, since “desire can make anything into a god.”
Reviewed on: 02/25/2008
Genre: Fiction
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