Atlantis
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher 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 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Doty's fourth collection, coming after the 1993 National Book Critics' Circle award-winning My Alexandria, is anchored in the lush and pressing world of loss. He begins calmly with sensually descriptive poems that fully observe the complex brilliances of grasses of a salt marsh, of the shell of a crab or a row of mackerel. Loss and grief are introduced in a narrative poem, ``Grosse Fugue,'' about a friend dying of AIDS. Grief intensifies and climaxes with the title poem, the book's centerpiece, a chronicle of his lover and other friends infected with AIDS, highlighting the related nightmares and desperations that become part of everyday life. Anger follows as settings shift from seaside to inner city; the speaker's spirit toughens. The stunning ``Homo Will Not Inherit'' explodes with pride, rage and shame over the longings of a gay man in an urban landscape. The concluding poems, returned to the natural world and heavy and ripe with the imagery of fall and winter, unearth a saving, harsh beauty in the movement of bodies through space and time toward death.
