Sweet Machine: Poems - Softcover

Doty, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060952563 ISBN 13: 9780060952563

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 1998

Synopsis

Mark Doty's last two award-winning collections of poetry, as well as his acclaimed memoir Heaven's Coast, used the devastation of AIDS as a lens through which to consider questions of loss, love and identity. The poems in his new collection, Sweet Machine, see the world from a new, hard-won perspective: A coming back to life, after so much death, a way of seeing the body's "sweet machine" not simply as a time bomb, but also as a vibrant, sensual, living thing. These poems are themselves "sweet machines"--lyrical, exuberant and joyous--and they mark yet another milestone in the extraordinary career of one of our most distinguished and accomplished poets.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Doty's books of poetry and nonfiction prose have been honored with numerous distinctions, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and, in the United Kingdom, the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2008, he won the National Book Award for Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems. He is a professor at the University of Houston, and he lives in New York City.

Review

"Mark Doty says, 'What I love about language/is what I love about fog: /what comes between us and things/grants them shine.' What comes between Mark Doty and the things in "Sweet Machine" is the sheerest translucent membrane of regard, the astonishing gloss of his eye's sweep and pinpoint--his luminous language. Nothing escapes his gaze and nothing--death, devastation, the ghost of a gesture--escapes its sheer insistence on beauty, the world 'lustered by the veil.' Mark Doty is a master, re-painting our sad daily canvas, heightening the gold light, the diffusion, the shocked shattered glass and the artificial bath of attitude, letting us see it all arrayed, as he says, under the 'uncompromising vault of heaven.'" -- Carol Muske"Having published the first poem and the last, I thought--having read the old poems too--I had known what to expect, but the senses are always new, and Doty's loyalty to them, and to the sense they make, continues to astonish, to enlighten, to console." -- Richard Howard"Strange paradise, complete with worms', Mark Doty begins a poem. In four collections of poetry, this masterful poet writes elegies so full of life we find our hope restored. Moving, splendidly observant and unflinching, Mark Doty's poems extend the range of the American lyric poem."-- Citation for the Writer Bynner Prize for Poetry awared by the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0060952563
• ISBN 13: 9780060952563
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128