Book description
When Mark Doty's My Alexandria was published in 1993, the
response was one of unanimous celebration. Writing with unmatched
technical virtuosity and stunning honesty Doty never flinches from his
subject - how we live when what we live for is about to be taken from
us - and the poems collected in My Alexandria revealed
powerfully the inextricable connection between communion and loss.
In his latest collection, Atlantis, Doty claims the mythical
lost island as his own: a paradise whose memory he must keep alive at
the same time that he is forced to renounce its hold on him. Atlantis
recedes, just as the lives of those Doty loves continue to be
extinguished by the devastation of AIDS. Doty's struggle is to
reconcile with, and even to celebrate the evanescence of our earthly
connections - and to understand how we can love more at the very
moment that we must consent to let go.
Atlantis is a work of astounding maturity and grace, and it
will further the already extraordinary reputation of this poet who
seeks - and finds - redemption in his brilliant and courageous poems.
Mark Doty's poetry collections include
My Alexandria
,
Atlantis
,
Sweet Machine
,
Source
and
School of the Arts
. He has received many honours for his poetry, including the National
Book Critics Circle Award, a Whiting Writers Award, a Guggenheim
Fellowship, and a Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Award. A National Book
Award finalist and two-time recipient of a National Endowment for the
Arts Fellowship, he is the only American poet to have won the T. S.
Eliot Prize. The author of three prose volumes -
Heaven's Coast
,
Firebird
, and
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon
- he is a professor at the University of Houston and lives in New York
City and Provincetown.
