Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems [Hardcover]

Mark Doty (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 11, 2008

Mark Doty's Fire to Fire collects the best of his seven books of poetry, along with a generous selection of new work. His signature style encompasses both the plainspoken and the artfully wrought, as one of contemporary American poetry's most lauded, recognizable voices speaks to the crises and possibilities of our time.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

SignatureReviewed by Reginald ShepherdDoty's first book, Turtle, Swan, appeared in 1987. He has published six books of poetry and four memoirs, all excellent, since. This hefty selection from his seven collections, plus a generous sheaf of new poems, should solidify his position as a star of contemporary American poetry. Doty's poetic career really took off with My Alexandria (1993), his third book, which made his reputation. Fire to Fire contains only two poems from his first two books—Adonis Theatre, about an old movie palace turned gay porno theater, and The Death of Antinous, about the Roman emperor Hadrian's lover's afterlife in statuary, both of which are meditations on representation, absence and desire. Desire, and its capacity to transform and transfigure, is one of Doty's main themes. Enough desire (so often mixed, as T.S. Eliot wrote, with memory) can make us as beautiful as the objects of our desire. 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 School of the Arts (2005) is a gorgeous meditation on the way that life's fire infuses the world, in sunflowers, goldfinches, and even a neighbor's puppy: fire longs to meet itself/flaring, longing wants a multiplicity of faces,//branching and branching out. The selections from The Vault (which really needs to be read in its entirety) reveal the poetry in men meeting other men's bodies in a sex club, incorporating references to the Middle English poem Western Wind and to James Wright's A Blessing, and including a subtle revision of Rilke's Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes in which the men are deep in the club's mine of souls, that shaft where inner and outer//grow indissoluble. 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.Reginald Shepherd's most recent books are Fata Morgana, poems, and the just-published Orpheus in the Bronx, prose on poetry.
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From Booklist

The word that keeps leaping to mind, as you read through this gratifyingly thick collection of poems, is fluent. Doty’s facility with his chosen form—usually unrhymed stanzas of two, three, and four lines each, the meter floating between three beats and four—is so natural that the craft in his work is all but invisible; he makes the damnably difficult look deceptively simple. This impression of ease may also have something to do with the sense that Doty has found some breathing room, in his work and his private life. His death-haunted poems from earlier books about the age of AIDS—“an acronym, a vacant / four-letter cipher / that draws meanings into itself, / reconstitutes the world”—give way here to recent poems about a more hopeful life with new friends, new vistas, new narratives, all rendered in a way that feels at once confessional and universal. Not that death’s irrelevant—ghosts and apparitions, such as spotting John Berryman having lunch in a diner in Chelsea, still make regular appearances—but the poet has made his peace with it. --Kevin Nance

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1 edition (March 11, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060752475
• ISBN-13: 978-0060752477
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #850,751 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A quintessential poetry experience.......a must have for any serious reader or writer of contemporary American poetry!, April 21, 2008

By 

Audrey C. Friedman (Rhode Island) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (Hardcover)

Mark Doty is one poet who continually astonishes me. I read his work and am always swept up in his lush vocabulary, the musicality of his language, the richness of details in the images he creates of the natural world. Suddenly, I realize, usually with an audible gasp, that he has taken me somewhere unexpected; he led me gently somewhere I can make meaning in a much more personal context. One way he does this, I believe, is by giving the reader emotional distance by using metaphors so deftly and so subtly. The reader finds beauty even in the darkest places.

Doty is the poet who led me to poetry, and I do believe that "Fire to Fire" is the book I'd take to the proverbial "desert island" with me. I've reread his paperback titles so many times that they are nearly disintegrating. After reading "Pipistrelle," "The Green Crab's Shell," "The Source," and so many other new and old favorites all beautifully bound in this hard cover volume, I do believe I'm doing triple lutzes! I'm off the ground!

This book is a must-have for anyone who reads, collects, and studies contemporary American poetry.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good clear poems without nebulous intellectualization, April 25, 2009

By 

James M. Robinson "JMR" (Huntsville, AL USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (Hardcover)

Mark Doty's poems are clear and personal without being ambiguously intellectualized. Personal and intimate without being sentimental. Intelligent without being academic. This is not university workshop stuff. It comes from the outside world of a variety of cities, towns and provinces. The 300+ pages of selected poems offer a great general overview of the poet's work up to now. The back cover shows enthusiastic endorsements from Phillip Levine, Mary Oliver, Robert Pinski, and Alan Shapiro. Amazon makes the book easily available from various sources and economical.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An embarrassment of riches, January 24, 2009

By 

ishi (Connecticut, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (Hardcover)

This book was my introduction to Mark Doty, and it did not disappoint. His language is rich, dense, almost overwhelming sometimes. A poet myself, I find myself becoming jealous of his descriptions, so original and perfect are they. For example, in his poem "Theory of beauty (Grackles on Montrose)" his descriptions of the sounds the birds make include "drop the tin can", "really creaky hinge," and "limping siren." Not to mention "tea kettle in hell." Wonderful! If you get this book and like it, let me also recommend "The Water Sonnets" by Kenton Wing Robinson. They are tighter and more economical poems but vividly descriptive.