This is a gorgeous collection & ceertainly deserves the National Book Award prize! I've spent about 4 months slowly savoring the book. It's like reading Doty's biography as he presents poetry about being gay, having a lover, watching his lover & many, many friends die. He also shares his love for all his dogs and the sadness of their old age & eventual deaths(which he wrote beautifully about in his recent biographical book, Dog Years. Toward the end of the collection poems appear about a new par...

Doty has an impressive mastery of a wide range of material: animal poems (MOST DEFINITELY the dog poem), nature poems, nature poems of the city setting, death. Take Emily Dickinson and Mary Oliver with Miles Davis as a donor father, and you now have their bastard child, for while Doty's handling is of the utmost seriousness, there is a love and play of language and rhythm and sound that infuses through it all. I must admit that reading a bunch at a stretch, as I am a Sandy refugee hiding away in...

Mark Doty's incredible ability to describe events, objects, human emotion, tragedy, and most remarkably, beauty is exemplified in this collection. This is by far my favorite book of poetry. If you are not an aficionado of poetry or find yourself intimidated by it - don't pass this one by. You will be enriched by this.

I hadn't read the last three Doty books before checking this out (Source, School of the Arts, and new poems). A lot of his poems have similar occasions and moves, but reading his more recent work alongside the very few poems reprinted from his books before My Alexandria, you can see what a sensitive instrument he's made of his syntax and stanza over the years. Treating the same subjects many times has spurred as much depth and invention as repetition. There's also more straying from radiance in

I just couldn't get into this collection. Sure, I found a handful of poems I really did enjoy, but the rest seemed "blah" to me.

Doty’s status as detached observer to his own work was significantly complicated by this volume, Fire to Fire, his most successful yet. Mark Doty is one of the finest poets in America today and knows his way with words, with phrases that illuminate his stances, with defining emotions inaudible to most of us. He led me gently somewhere I can make meaning in a much more personal context. One way he does this, I believe, is by giving the reader emotional distance by using metaphors so deftly and so...

This was my first experience with Mark Doty's poetry, and he's already become one of my absolute favorite contemporary poets. Something heartbreakingly poignant at the heart of his poems, which are simple, often lyric, but with a magic that can only be called poetry. Just fabulous. Pick up his book, read it. Revel in the images. Revel in the words.

"Jewelry, tides, language:things that shine.What is description, after all,but encoded desire?And if we saythe marsh, if we forgeterms for it, then isn't itcontained in us,a little,the brightness?"I've been reading "Fire to Fire" for some time, and will continue to do so. A poem a day--or a poem for two or three days, or a week: each reading reveals more. I love to say the words out loud, to play with the rhythm and sounds and images in my mind."Any small thing can save you.Because the golden eg...

i fucking love him. this is a collection of poems. he is such a great observer of human nature. realistic and romantic at the same time.

I saw Mark Doty read at The Center last month and was reminded how much I like him, and why—his work is so full of observation and exquisite description and shining moments and everyday wonders. This collection of poems, which includes new work and selections from previous books, is just what I want to be reading right now, deeply satisfying from the very beginning, which is a poem about writing a poem and Doty's sensibility of detailed observation, of "filling in the tale" (3). I love that so m...

A beautiful book. Not my favorite, ever, but gorgeous all the same. And there is something that feels so good to read 318 pages of poetry, all by the same poet. I love the regular collections, the 70 pages of the average poetry collection, the unity of the idea, the power of the knockout punch, but to live within a poet's world for several days, to read poems from seven different collections, and new poems, from a spread of twenty years, is an experience unto itself. I've been intimidated by poe...

and beauty resides not withinindividual objects but in the nearlyunimaginable richness of their relation.Doty is quite good at elucidating those tenuous connections between objects and subjects, exploring both the ordinary and transcendent. This being my first read I can't really give more of a review until I know the work better from further readings. But he's certainly a contemporary poet that I want to read again.

A courageous and emotionally powerful collection, "Fire to Fire" exhibits Mark Doty's poetical range and aesthetic. He speaks with clarity of language and image, is not afraid to allow the natural world to speak for him, and faces death and life after the deaths of so many close to him with honesty and impossible hope:"All smolder and oxblood, these flowerheads, flames of August: fierce bronze, or murky rose, petals concluded in gold— And as if fire called its double down the paired goldfinches

I have a love hate relationship with this book. As for the new poems, some of them are really beautiful. My favorites were "Pipistrelle," "The Word," "In the Airport Marshes," "Apparition (favorite poem)," "Citizens" and "And Angel of Prague." However, I was not in love with the 11 poems whose titles began with the word "Theory." As to the selected poems from old books-I liked the poems from Atlantis (1995) the best. I also enjoyed many from My Alexandria (1993) and from Sweet Machine (1998). So...

I’ve been meaning to read a volume of poetry by Mark Doty, for years. I’ve always found ‘Night Ferry’ rather special and have re-read it many times.I was, initially, disappointed with these poems, which kick off with New Poems, which were not as I’d expected. I suspect that what I find slightly off putting in New Poems was the suspicion that there wasn’t a lot to them. One of my notes reads “vocal ventriloquism.” Later – when I’d read the entire collection – I revised my opinion (I’d come to kno...

Some nice new poems. Missing some of my favorites, though, like "Letter to Walt Whitman" and "An Island Sheaf: Key West". Most Selecteds fall short for me--I'd rather the integrity of the original collection.

Mark Doty is especially good in the new poems, I think, at capturing a sense of particularity within a city or community; he sets the individual within a moving scene (say, a New York City street or a Houston shop) and slows down the action to help us appreciate the variety of daily life.I'm particularly fond of the new (and newer) poetry in this collection. I have to admit that some of the earlier poems, published during the peak years of the AIDS crisis, when Doty watched many friends and love...

enjoying the new ones, fun to see which poems are selected from previous books which I've read...couldn't stop reading, opening 50 pp of new poems show his skill and continued evolution; enjoyed re-reading earlier poems as well; SWEET MACHINE collection from 10 yrs ago is still a favorite & a favorite poem is 'Heaven for Paul" from the 2005 SCHOOL OF THE ARTS...many other favorites including his dog poems, something I thought I'd never like..Doty's voice is incredible, it vibrates the page

It was definitely enjoyable and interesting, even though it's not my kind of poetry. I usually prefer less abstract poems, the kind you manage to instantly 'feel' what the poet was talking about.

This was so good I actually had to wait to calm down before writing this review so it wasn't just an incoherent ramble about the book's awesomeness. Every single poem was beautiful and elegant and meaningful. His assorted "Theory of Beauty" poems really show all the ways a person can find beauty in the world. My favorite pieces were "Theory of Narrative" which is exactly what is sounds like, "Atlantis," which is a poignant, beautiful poem that tells of his experience while his partner, Wally Rob...