Deep Lane: Poems
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“His best work yet . . . astute, contemplative, and deeply moving.” —Washington Post
Mark Doty’s poetry has long been celebrated for its risk and candor, an ability to find transcendent beauty even in the mundane and grievous, an unflinching eye that—as Philip Levine says—“looks away from nothing.” In the poems of Deep Lane the stakes are higher: there is more to lose than ever before, and there is more for us to gain. “Pure appetite,” he writes ironically early in the collection, “I wouldn’t know anything about that.” And the following poem answers:
Down there the little star-nosed engine of desire
at work all night, secretive: in the morning
a new line running across the wet grass, near the surface,
like a vein. Don’t you wish the road of excess
led to the palace of wisdom, wouldn’t that be nice?
Deep Lane is a book of descents: into the earth beneath the garden, into the dark substrata of a life. But these poems seek repair, finally, through the possibilities that sustain the speaker aboveground: gardens and animals, the pleasure of seeing, the world tuned by the word. Time and again, an image of immolation and sacrifice is undercut by the fierce fortitude of nature: nature that is not just a solace but a potent antidote and cure. Ranging from agony to rapture, from great depths to hard-won heights, these are poems of grace and nobility.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Doty (Sweet Machine), whose Fire to Fire won the 2008 National Book Award, will sate his many admirers with this eighth collection. Having gained renown for his self-consciously beautiful, heart-on-sleeve elegies about the devastations of HIV/AIDS, Doty remains elegiac and continues to attend to beauty. He also does some of his best work yet as a nature poet. Wayward mammals, urban saplings, beaches, forests, and yards (as in the eight poems all titled "Deep Lane") stand for the omnipresence of mortality, and the persistence of wild desire: a "Little Mammoth," "milk-tusks not even/ sprouted," drowns in a prehistoric clay pit; "the striped snake in the garden loves me/ so fiercely she never comes near." The people in the poems a needle-drug addict, a survivor of a suicide attempt make frightening choices, though such choices seem natural to them. We are animals too, says Doty, but we inscribe our choices in language such as the choice to greet the day, or to look backward on friends and lovers and previous poems. The longest (perhaps the best) work connects a shuttered barbershop on 18th Street in Manhattan to the other losses in Doty's memory: "I have not forgotten one of you," he prays, "may I never forget one of you these layers of men,/ arrayed in the dark in their no-longer breathing ranks."
