Source Poems

From late-afternoon Manhattan to Walt Whitman's Camden, Mark Doty records the fierce, luminous stubbornness of ordinary life.

This bold, wide-ranging collection -- his sixth book of poems -- demonstrates the unmistakable lyricism, fierce observation, and force of feeling that have made Mark Doty's poems special to readers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Here Doty chronicles the regilded spire of a seaside meetinghouse. His poems confront the transience of the flesh; their attentive stanzas weigh the physical world against the shadow of loss.

Whether examining Walt Whitman's clapboard house in Camden or three horses, the collection grounds each inquiry in concrete fact. This volume charts the stubborn resilience of desire; its cadence captures the sudden flare of a city corner or an animal's fleeting eye.

The poems in Source deepen Doty's exploration of the paradox of selfhood. They offer a complex, boldly colored self-portrait; their muscular lines argue fiercely with the fact of limit; they pulse with the drama of perception and the quest to forge meaning.

• Contemporary Poetry: In a parlor called 666, Doty watches an inked heart etched onto his partner's arm, turning tender flesh into enduring art.
• Poetry and Poetics: Inside the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, an errant bat circles after hours, skimming the varnished light of Albert Bierstadt's monumental Yosemite canvas.
• Elegiac Reflections: Doty recalls a 1992 midwinter benefit for friends with AIDS, where a performer in a dark leotard delivers Kurt Weill's lyrics against the relentless falling snow.
• Raw Honesty: Along a sun-bleached Key West curb, a wandering hermit crab makes an improbable shelter out of an empty, discarded can of watermelon soda.
• Also by This Author: Fire to Fire, Atlantis and Sweet Machine.