Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Mar 2008
336 pages
Genre: Poetry & Novels in Verse
Publication Information
Mark Doty's Fire to Fire collects the best of Mark Doty's seven books of poetry, along with a generous selection of new work. Doty's subjects—our mortal situation, the evanescent beauty of the world, desire's transformative power, and art's ability to give shape to human lives—echo and develop across twenty years of poems. His signature style encompasses both the plainspoken and the artfully wrought; here one of contemporary American poetry's most lauded, recognizable voices speaks to the crises and possibilities of our times.
National Book Awards, 2008
"His narrative style is expansive, filled with what has been described as a "lyric glitter" that creates radiance around the ordinary." - Library Journal.
"Doty satisfies the ear and the mind in much of Fire to Fire. At times his poems become too abstract or overblown, especially the new work. That’s when readers will most appreciate – and miss – his ability to reveal moments that they might otherwise have overlooked .... Yet weaknesses aside, [this work is] not just memorable but necessary." - The Christian Science Monitor.
"Fire to Fire should solidify Doty's position as a star of contemporary American poetry…The poems combine close attention to the fragile, contingent things of the world with the constant, almost unavoidable chance of transcendence." - Boxed Signature Review, Publishers Weekly.
"Doty's facility with his chosen form...is so natural that the craft in his work is all but invisible; he makes the damnably difficult look deceptively simple." - Booklist.
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Photo: Kenneth Chen
Mark Doty's books of poetry and nonfiction prose have been honored with such distinctions as the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and, in the United Kingdom, the T. S. Eliot Prize. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He is a professor at Rutgers University and lives in New York City.
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