Atlantis: Poems by [Paperback]

Mark Doty (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1995

The poignant, accomplished new collection of poetry from the author of My Alexandria--1993 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Los Angeles Times Book Award, 1993 National Book Award Finalist.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"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

From Publishers Weekly

Doty's fourth collection, coming after the 1993 National Book Critics' Circle award-winning My Alexandria, is anchored in the lush and pressing world of loss. He begins calmly with sensually descriptive poems that fully observe the complex brilliances of grasses of a salt marsh, of the shell of a crab or a row of mackerel. Loss and grief are introduced in a narrative poem, "Grosse Fugue," about a friend dying of AIDS. Grief intensifies and climaxes with the title poem, the book's centerpiece, a chronicle of his lover and other friends infected with AIDS, highlighting the related nightmares and desperations that become part of everyday life. Anger follows as settings shift from seaside to inner city; the speaker's spirit toughens. The stunning "Homo Will Not Inherit" explodes with pride, rage and shame over the longings of a gay man in an urban landscape. The concluding poems, returned to the natural world and heavy and ripe with the imagery of fall and winter, unearth a saving, harsh beauty in the movement of bodies through space and time toward death.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; 1st edition (September 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060951060
• ISBN-13: 978-0060951061
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #646,205 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The new Romanticism, July 1, 1998

By 

David P. Ryan (Austin, Texas) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Atlantis: Poems by (Paperback)

For contemorary readers who hunger for the melody and cadence, imagery of nature, strong personal emotion, and idealism of poetry in the Romantic tradition, Mark Doty has emerged with a lyrical style reminiscent of Shelly or Keats. The most immediately appealing feature of his work is its sheer lyric loveliness. Loveliness does not stand high these days in the vocabulary of critical praise, but one only need leaf through Doty's Atlantis Poems to be reminded that it does exist and can't easily be called by another name.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Much better than I expected, July 4, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Atlantis: Poems by (Paperback)

I only started reading Mark Doty because he teaches at my university and I wanted to get a feel for his style before taking a course by him. I read Turtle, Swan, and only one of the poems in that collection left any impression upon me. (The title poem of the book--it touched me very deeply.) I came into Atlantis not expecting more than one poem to impress me.

I was pleasantly surprised. In this collection, he wrote many more poems about his homosexuality (as opposed to boring nature poems), people he knew, and talked more about his love of language. He talked about real things as opposed to the esoteric things poets seem to love. It's poetry that is simple enough for most to understand, yet it doesn't hit you over the head with what it's trying to say.

Mark Doty is always lyrical, and uses wonderful words, but this collection also has some poems about real life. It is well worth the price and time.

7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect and Delicate, October 1, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Atlantis: Poems by (Paperback)

This is the most exquisite book of poetry I have ever read. Doty uses images so vivid and beautiful it will leave you in tears, wishing for more. He is one of the most transcendant poets of the century.