Sweet Machine

by Mark Doty

Book Overview

Mark Doty's last two award-winning collections of poetry, as well as his acclaimed memoir Heaven's Coast, used the devastation of AIDS as a lens through which to consider questions of loss, love and identity. The poems in his new collection, Sweet Machine, see the world from a new, hard-won perspective: A coming back to life, after so much death, a way of seeing the body's sweet machine not simply as a time bomb, but also as a vibrant, sensual,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060952563
• ISBN13: 9780060952563
• Release Date: March 1998
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 132 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Immortal

Rarely do you come across a poet able to maintain a voice as pure and frank as Mark Doty's. He approaches prevalent themes such as grief, loss, and love with enchanting diction, virtue, and elegance. Beyond his ability to achieve the perfect balance of lyric, image, narrative, mystery, and form, his unwavering beauty (I think) lies somewhere in the synergy of candor and compassion, as in the ending of one of my favorite poems (a direct-address to a lover who has passed and returns in a dream) "Bless you. You came back, so I could see you once more, plainly, so I could rest against you without thinking this happiness lessened anything, without thinking you were alive again." In short, his poems are brimming with that rare magic that make poets want to write.

Doty casts his spell

This is a beautiful book, full of poems that call the reader to be more fully human, more empathetic, more intelligent, more intensely alive. Doty is a writer's writer, in that his work sensitizes the reader to the magical powers of language as well as to the beauty and richness of the world he writes about with such passion. Thank you, Mark Doty!

wondrous.

i was so very happy when this book came out - hard to follow up to atlantis, but this book manages to soar to new heights in its lyric intensity and overall emotional arc. mature and beautiful, sewn with expertise and true poetic vision.