Fire to fire New and selected poems

Review by Booklist Review

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.--Nance, Kevin Copyright 2008 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Doty'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. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

"Pages falling into sleep and dust,/ dust and sleep, burning so slowly/ you wouldn't even know there was a fire." Yet every one of the poems here is ablaze, each illuminating its subject and fixing it in our minds before it disappears. This book won the National Book Award for the already trophy-laden Doty. (LJ 4/1/08) (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Fire to Fire New and Selected Poems Pipistrelle His music, Charles writes, makes us avoidable. I write: emissary of evening. We're writing poems about last night's bat. Charles has stripped the scene to lyric, while I'm filling in the tale: how, when we emerged from the inn, an unassuming place in the countryside near Hoarwithy, not far from the Wye, two twilight mares in a thorn-hedged field across the road--clotted cream and raw gray wool, vaguely above it all-- came a little closer. Though when we approached they ignored us and went on softly tearing up audible mouthfuls, so we turned in the other direction, toward Lough Pool, a mudhole scattered with sticks beneath an ancient conifer's vast trunk. Then Charles saw the quick ambassador fret the spaces between boughs with an inky signature too fast to trace. We turned our faces upward, trying to read the deepening blue between black limbs. And he said again, There he is! Though it seemed only one of us could see the fluttering pipistrelle at a time--you'd turn your head to where he'd been, no luck, he'd already joined a larger dark. There he is! Paul said it, then Pippa. Then I caught the fleeting contraption speeding into a bank of leaves, and heard the high, two-syllabled piping. But when I said what I'd heard, no one else had noticed it, and Charles said, Only some people can hear their frequencies. Fifty years old and I didn't know I could hear the tender cry of a bat --cry won't do: a diminutive chime somewhere between merriment and weeping, who could ever say? I with no music to my name save what I can coax into a line, no sense of pitch, heard the night's own one-sided conversation. What to make of the gift? An oddity, like being double-jointed, or token of some kinship to the little Victorian handbag dashing between the dim bulks of trees? Of course the next day we begin our poems. Charles considers the pipistrelle's music navigational, a modest, rational understanding of what I have decided is my personal visitation. Is it because I am an American I think the bat came especially to address me, who have the particular gift of hearing him? If he sang to us, but only I heard him, does that mean he sang to me? Or does that mean I am a son of Whitman, while Charles is an heir of Wordsworth, albeit thankfully a more concise one? Is this material necessary or helpful to my poem, even though Charles admires my welter of detail, my branching questions? Couldn't I compose a lean, meditative evocation of what threaded over our wondering heads, or do I need to do what I am doing now, and worry my little aerial friend with a freight not precisely his? Does the poem reside in experience or in self-consciousness about experience? Shh, says the evening near the Wye. Enough, say the hungry horses. Listen to my poem, says Charles. A word in your ear, says the night. Fire to Fire New and Selected Poems . Copyright © by Mark Doty. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems by Mark Doty All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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