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.
Atlantis
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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 begunThis 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
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 worldrising from the waters again:
our continent, where it always was....
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.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format: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
By A Customer
Format: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.
By MegaManII
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Delivery was right on time and secure; no damage. Great service there.
While I haven't read much of it yet, I was very pleasantly surprised to find my used copy has been signed by the author. Good deal.
While I haven't read much of it yet, I was very pleasantly surprised to find my used copy has been signed by the author. Good deal.
7 of 11 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format: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.
2 of 27 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Mark Doty's poems are seriously overrated. They are overwritten, full of what reads as faked-up emotion, limited in range--both of subject and imagery. Can't think of anything to say? Just pile on more language.
2 of 41 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Pretentious, overdone, myopic, ca-ca
