Atlantis: Poems book cover

Atlantis: Poems

Author(s): Mark Doty (Author)

Publisher: Perennial
Publication Date: September 1, 1995
Edition: First Edition
Language: English
Print length: 112 pages
ISBN-10: 0060951060
ISBN-13: 9780060951061

Book Description

The poignant, accomplished new collection of poetry from the author of My Alexandria–1993 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Los Angeles Times Book Award, 1993 National Book Award Finalist.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

“I was so filled with longing / –is that what sound is for?– / I seemed to be nowhere at all,” Mark Doty rhapsodizes while watching geese fly in “Migratory,” another double vision in his award-winning fourth book, Atlantis. Forming a moving elegy to the poet’s lover, Wally, the individual tercets and couplets speak in a cautious but brave rhetoric combining the best of Frost and Bishop. The book removes its mourning clothes and goes downtown, full of rage, to sit in the steam baths of the edgy “Homo Will Not Inherit,” in which the speaker says, “I’ll tell you what I’ll inherit: the margins.” Indeed, Doty’s speakers are most likely found in tidal, watery margins that indulge his double vision of land and sea interweaving like body and spirit. Atlantis begins merely as marshland uncovered at low tide:

Now the tide’s begun
its clockwork turn, pouring,

in the day’s hourglass
toward the other side of the world,

and our dependable marsh reappears
…And our ongoingness,

what there’ll be of us? Look,
love, the lost world

rising from the waters again:
our continent, where it always was…. This austerity lapses into sentimentality only once, when Wally pets a dog. Yet even here, Doty delivers an aesthetic message, that the touch “isn’t about grasping / …so much will / must be summoned, / such attention brought / to the work–which is all / he is now, this gesture.” It is as though Wally’s death has released Doty from the uneasy assurances of earlier poems, causing him to rediscover how life exists in metaphor, and at one remove, the language of poetry. “Description is travel,” he writes, and like Frost in “Birches,” he travels along his metaphors, climbing until they bend and bring him back to a world changed by the experience. Atlantis and his previous book, My Alexandria, are valuable chronicles of sensibility and intelligence laid bare. — Edward Skoog

From Library Journal

A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for My Alexandria, Doty offers “eloquent meditations on the essential themes?mortality and life, beauty and loss” (LJ 4/14/93)?in poems haunted by the specter of AIDS.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

“There is a mighty lesson in Atlantis and it is this—that we are helpless before fate, except in our demeanor. . . . Mark Doty has written a book that is ferocious, luminous, and important.” — Mary Oliver

“Having by his third book raised the roof of the America Sublime, Doty is now concerned, like Clampitt before him, to frame doors and windows, to detail landscapes and outbuildings of loss which, in the ways of the Sublime, properly circumstantiated, are transformed, transcended, redeemed. A lost continent breaks through the surface, glistening still with tears, but exact, vivid, there.” — Richard Howard

From the Inside Flap

In his latest collection, Atlantis, Doty claims the mythical lost island as his own: a fading 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. Set in the harbor village of Provincetown, whose charming, cluttered landscape Doty brings to life, the collection chronicles the illness and death of Doty’s beloved partner, as well as many others whose worlds have been both ravaged and broadened by this disease. Doty’s struggle is to reconcile with, and even to celebrate, the evanescence of our earthly connections – to those we love, to the shifting physical landscape, even to our strongest feelings – and to understand how we can love more at the very moment that we must consent to let go.

From the Back Cover

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Atlantis

Poems byBy Doty, Mark

Perennial

My salt marsh

–mine, I call it, because

these day-hammered fields

of dazzled horizontals

undulate, summers,

inside me and out–

how can I say what it is?

Sea lavender shivers

over the tidewater steel.

A million minnows ally

with their million shadows

(lucky we’ll never need

to know whose is whose).

The bud of storm loosens:

watered paint poured

dark blue onto the edge

of the page. Haloed grasses,

gilt shadow-edged body of dune. . .

I could go on like this.

I love the language

of the day’s ten thousand aspects,

the creases and flecks

in the map, these

brilliant gouaches.

But I’m not so sure it’s true,

what I was taught, that through

the particular’s the way

to the universal:

what I need to tell is

swell and curve, shift

and blur of boundary,

tremble and spilling over,

a heady purity distilled

from detail. A metaphor, then:

in this tourist town,

the retail legions purvey

the far-flung world’s

bangles: brilliance of Nepal

and Mozambique, any place

where cheap labor braids

or burnishes or hammers

found stuff into jewelry’s

lush grammar,

a whole vocabulary

of ornament: copper and lacquer,

shells and seeds from backwaters

with fragrant names, millefiori

milled into African beads, Mexican abalone,

camelbone and tin, cinnabar

and verdigris, silver,

black onyx, coral,

gold: one vast conjugation

of the verb

to shine.

And that

is the marsh essence–

all the hoarded riches

of the world held

and rivering, a gleam

awakened and doubled

by water, flashing

off the bowing of the grass.

Jewelry, tides, language:

things that shine.

What is description, after all,

but encoded desire?

And if we say

the marsh, if we forge

terms for it, then isn’t it

contained in us,

a little,

the brightness? <

Four Cut Sunflowers, One Upside Down

Turbulent stasis on a blue ground.

What is any art but static flame?

Fire of spun gold, grain.

This brilliant flickering’s

arrested by named (Naples,

chrome, cadmium) and nameless

yellows, tawny golds. Look

at the ochre sprawl–how

they sprawl, these odalisques,

withering coronas

around the seedheads’ intricate precision.

Even drying, the petals curling

into licks of fire,

they’re haloed in the pure rush of light

yellow is. One theory of color,

before Newton broke the world

through the prism’s planes

and nailed the primaries to the wheel,

posited that everything’s made of yellow

and blue–coastal colors

which engender, in their coupling,

every other hue, so that the world’s

an elaborated dialogue

between citron and Prussian blue.

They are a whole summer to themselves.

They are a nocturne

in argent and gold, and they burn

with the ferocity

of dying (which is to say, the luminosity

of what’s living hardest). Is it a human soulContinues…
Excerpted from Atlantisby Doty, Mark Copyright © 2004 by Mark Doty. Excerpted by permission.
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