Mark
Doty

Mark Doty is one of America’s most celebrated writers. He is the only American poet to have won Great Britain’s T.S. Eliot Prize, and is the author of six books of poems. His third collection, My Alexandria (1993), received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since then he has published Atlantis (1995), Sweet Machine (1998) and Source (2001), as well as the memoirs Heaven’s Coast (1996) and Firebird (1999). His newest volume of poems, School of the Arts, was published in 2005 by HarperCollins. Among his many other awards are two NEA fellowships, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Bynner Prize. Doty teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of Houston, and lives in Houston and in New York City. Doty’s most recent book, Dog Years: A Memoir, was published in 2007.

Dog Years: A Memoir
In Dog Years Doty explores, with compassion and intelligence, the complicated, loving territory inhabited by devoted dogs and their loyal humans. In 1994, when the author’s longtime lover was dying of AIDS, beloved pet Arden kept the surviving partner afloat. A new adoptee, the rambunctious Beau, in his “sloppy dog way,” becomes a part of the tribe and carries some of the burden of grief. Doty says Beau “carried something else for me too, which was my will to live.” In a time of devastating pain, as well as in happier times, Doty’s two dogs are the “secret heroes of my own vitality.” The dog characters in the book are irresistible: Arden’s quiet nobility and slow decline breaks the heart, while Beau’s goofy enthusiasm peaks with youth and mellows in illness. Doty delivers a soulful love story which illuminates no less than the big human mysteries: attachment, death, grief, loyalty, happiness. The book nimbly sidesteps sentimentality and lands squarely on a philosophical, inquisitive tone as intellectually evocative as it is resonant.

Turbulent stasis on a blue ground.
What is any art but static flame?

Fire of spun gold, grain.
This brilliant flickering’s

arrested by named (Naples,
chrome, cadmium) and nameless

yellows, tawny golds. Look
at the ochre sprawl—how

they sprawl, these odalisques,
withering coronas

around the seedheads’ intricate precision.
Even drying, the petals curling

into licks of fire,
they’re haloed in the pure rush of light

(from “Four Cut Sunflowers, One Upside Down”)

“With his clarity of vision and great heart, Doty stands among us an emblematic and shining presence.”

— Stanley Kunitz

“A new book of poems—or of anything—by Mark Doty is good news in a dark time. The precision, daring, scope, elegance of his compassion and of the language in which he embodies it are a reassuring pleasure.”

— W. S. Merwin