Fire to Fire

New and Selected Poems

Mark Doty

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780060752514
• eBook ISBN: 9780061856631
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women Authors Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

“Fire to Fire should solidify Doty’s position as a star of contemporary American poetry. . . . The poems combine close attention to the fragile, contingent things of the world with the constant, almost unavoidable chance of transcendence.” — Publishers Weekly

A landmark collection of new and published works by one of our finest poets that is a testament to the clarity and thoughtful lyricism of his poems

Fire to Fire collects the best works from seven books of poetry by Mark Doty, acclaimed poet and New York Times bestselling author of two memoirs, Firebird and Dog Years.

Doty’s subjects—our mortal situation, the evanescent beauty of the world, desire’s transformative power, and art’s ability to give shape to human lives—echo and develop across twenty years of poems. His signature style encompasses both the plainspoken and the artfully wrought; here one of contemporary American poetry’s most lauded, recognizable voices speaks to the crises and possibilities of our times.

from SWEET MACHINE (1998)

VISITATION

When I heard he had entered the harbor,

and circled the wharf for days,

I expected the worst: shallow water,

confusion, some accident to bring

the young humpback to grief.

Don’t they depend on a compass

lodged in the salt-flooded folds

of the brain, some delicate

musical mechanism to navigate

their true course? How many ways,

in our century’s late iron hours,

might we have led him to disaster?

That, in those days, was how

I’d come to see the world:

dark upon dark, any sense

of spirit an embattled flame

sparked against wind-driven rain

till pain snuffed it out. I thought,

This is what experience gives us,

and I moved carefully through my life

while I waited…Enough,

it wasn’t that way at all. The whale

—exuberant, proud maybe, playful,

like the early music of Beethoven—

cruised the footings for smelts

clustered near the pylons

in mercury flocks. He

(do I have the gender right?)

would negotiate the rusty hulls

of the Portuguese fishing boats

—Holy Infant, Little Marie—

with what could only be read

as pleasure, coming close

then diving, trailing on the surface

big spreading circles

until he’d breach, thrilling us

with the release of pressured breath,

and the bulk of his sleek young head

—a wet black leather sofa

already barnacled with ghostly lice—

and his elegant and unlikely mouth,

and the marvelous afterthought of the flukes,

and the way his broad flippers

resembled a pair of clownish gloves

or puppet hands, looming greenish white

beneath the bay’s clouded sheen.

When he had consumed his pleasure

of the swarm, his pleasure, perhaps,

in his own admired performance,

he swam out the harbor mouth,

into the Atlantic. And though grief

has seemed to me itself a dim,

salt suspension in which I’ve moved,

blind thing, day by day,

through the wreckage, barely aware

of what I stumbled toward, even I

couldn’t help but look

at the way this immense figure

graces the dark medium,

and shines so: heaviness

which is no burden to itself.

What did you think, that joy

was some slight thing?

WHERE YOU ARE

1.

flung to your salt parameters in all that wide gleam

unbounded edgeless in that brilliant intersection

where we poured the shattered grit the salt

and distillation of you which blew back

into my face stinging like a kiss

from the other world a whole year

you’ve languished blue in ceaseless wind

naked now in all lights and chill swaddlings

of cloud never for a moment cold you are

uninterruptible seamless as if all this time

you’d been sleeping in the sparkle and beckon

of it are you in the pour of it

as if there were a secret shining room

in the house and you’d merely gone there

we used to swim summers remember

naked in those shoals now I think was I ever

that easy in this life

fireworks remember Handel an orchestra

on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• New Poems: Theories and Apparitions
• From Turtle, Swan (1987)
• From Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (1991)
• From My Alexandria (1993)
• Days of 1981
• From Atlantis (1995)
• From Sweet Machine (1998)
• From Source (2001)
• From School of the Arts (2005)
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• About the Author
• Other Books by Mark Doty
• Copyright
• About the Publisher