School Of The Arts: Poems

Mark Doty

ISBN 10: 0060752459 / ISBN 13: 9780060752453

Published by New York: HarperCollins, 2005

About this Item

1st printing; signed by author. Fine HC in Very Good DJ. Dark brown boards, gilt letters. Bright, clean covers and spine; tightly bound; signed by author on title page; inscribed under signature '- for Arlene - | all my best | 4-29-05 | -Brattleboro - '; crisp, clean interior. DJ is bright, clean, complete; faintly scuffed on back cover. 8vo, 109 pp. Seller Inventory # M00149

Bibliographic Details

Title: School Of The Arts: Poems

Publisher: New York: HarperCollins

Publication Date: 2005

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Fine

Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

Signed: Inscribed by Author(s)

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

The darkly graceful poems in Mark Doty's seventh collection explore the ways in which we are educated by the implacable powers of time and desire. The world constantly renews itself, and the new brings both possibility and erasure. Given the limits of our own bodies, how are we to live within the inevitability of despair?

This is the plainest of Doty's books, its language stripped and humbled. But whatever depths are sounded in these poems, their humane and open music sustains. Art itself instructs us. Lucian Freud's startling renditions of human skin, Virginia Woolf's ecstatic depiction of consciousness, Caravaggio's only-too-real people elevated to difficult glory -- all turn the light of human intelligence upon "the night of time."

Formally inventive, warm, at once witty and disconsolate, School of the Arts represents a poet reinventing his own voice at midlife, finding a way through a troubled passage. Acutely attentive, insistently alive, this is a book of "fierce vulnerability."

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.