"Seeing Venice" - just the title is inviting. Who would not want to see this incomparable city, whether for the first time or again and again?

Mark Doty, poet and National Book Critics Circle Award winner, presents the Getty Museum's "View of the Grand Canal" in a lyrical essay accompanied by intriguing details from the painting. Doty calls our attention to various aspects of this masterpiece - water, sky and shadows.

He also focuses on other artists and writers who have been attracted by this mystical city - Henry James, Tintoretto, and the Brownings.

An especially treasured gift, the jacket of this small (approx. 5" by 5") book unfolds to a miniature poster of the painting, which is an outstanding item in the Getty's collection.

Bellotto, the painter, was a nephew of Canaletto and recognized for his idealized views of Venice. This particular painting measures over 4 feet by 7 feet, and limns a cross-section of Venetian society engaged in daily business.

Whether afficionados of Italy or not "Seeing Venice" is a mini treasure.

- Gail Cooke

SEEING VENICE is a truly appropriate title for this small gem of a book that celebrates the presence of the Bellotto 18th Century painting 'View of the Grand Canal' which graces the collection of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. As in his earlier book STILL LIFE WITH OYSTERS AND LEMON Mark Doty writes succinct conversations with us about just looking at this elegant painting. His intensely poetic vision accompanies us through the various aspects of not only the painting but of the history of Venice. He reminds us that Venice is essentially a relic from the past, loved by writers, painters, composers, and visitors. Why is it so universally loved? 'Part of the world's love for this place must have to do with the fact that it has always seemed ephemeral, doomed. Might the whole city drift away? Certainly it might go under.' Taking us on a visual journey of every aspect of the painting (reflections, the boats, the people, the domes, the endless vista into space, etc.), Doty pauses to remind us how we in this country treat historical buildings and places differently. 'We like our evidence of time at a distance: quaint, pickled in resin or amber. We don't want it near our bodies.' Poignant food for thought.

And as if this remarkably beautiful essay weren't enough the book is one of close details of the grand painting that spans the cover of the dust jacket: Doty's words are 'illustrated' by a careful art editor, unfolding in quality color, production and design. This is a stunning little work of words, history, art and poetry. Would that all great paintings could be so illuminated for us by this gifted man's eyes and words!

Mark Doty begins this book by describing a 350 year old Dutch painting "Still Life with Oysters and Lemon" that he has fallen in love with at the Metropolitan Museum. He then meanders to memories of his "Mamaw" from long ago in East Tennessee-- surely only Southerners call grandparents by that name-- to a poem by Cavafy, to buying an old Italianate Victorian House in Vermont with his partner who later died of AIDS. Along the way, Mr. Doty muses on the subject of balance: the desire to be in a relationship and the need to be free, the balance of order versus clutter, of staying rooted in one place and the need to travel-- and the joy of collecting simple, everyday imperfect things picked up in flea markets rather than perfect expensive objects.

There are so many good things to say about this little 70 page gem that one hardly knows where to begin. Too often I read a work of nonfiction and wish it had remained a short magazine article. That is not so with this book. I wanted it to go on and on. Whether or not the author is correct in his analysis of still life painting, he is completely convincing. Of course, his language is always both concise and beautiful and never gets in the way of what he is saying. Near the end of the book Mr. Doty says "What makes a poem a poem, finally, is that it is unparaphrasable. . . I may try to explain it or represent it in other terms, but then some element of its life will always be missing. It is the same with painting." Such a statement perfectly describes this little masterpiece.

Mark Doty has done the impossible. In STILL LIFE WITH OYSTERS AND LEMON he has not only written an extended essay (read epic poem) about his encounter with a simple Dutch Still Life painting, but he has also produced what must become the definitive map for looking, seeing, studying and describing the essence of art in a way that encourages us all to return to the pursuit of beauty. Doty has proved his credentials in art hisory and art technique so that he is able to find the essence of a still life, rhapsodize on the quality of light as captured by an everyday object that makes a centuries old painting seem immediate to our own home, and in doing so reveals his own history of memories, lovers, favorite objects, the passage of time as participants in the transitory moment we call life. So many art critics and art historians have attempted to find this plane of understanding and enlightment with only minimal degrees of success. As a curator and essayist about art I am humbled and in awe. 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. But this small book is more than an homage to a particular still life painting (though on that merit alone he wins the competition!). This is a tender, thoughtful journey toward discovering beauty that daily surrounds us, a call to accept the transitory nature in all things and to experience them while we may. No fatalism here, just a door opened to appreciate the cycle of being alive...which just happens to warmly include the aspect of dying as part of that totality. As in Still Life painting: artists have selflessly recreated moments precious to them, frozen them in time to stave off the finite, and in doing so have left us with miraculous images to incorporate into our psyches for perpetuating beauty. This book is a must for art students, for art lovers, and for everyone who yearns to understand the journey of the soul. As Doty informs us, paraphrasing poetry or a painting as focused as a still life is impossible; by nature the essence has been distilled. Writing a review of such a book is near impossible. Gift yourself with a book to which you will return as often as the author has returned to Still Life with Oysers and Lemon!

Mark Doty is one of the finest poets of our time, writing eloquent, informed poems, essays, books, and musings about life and art. To read FIREBIRD: A MEMOIR almost breaches credibility, so stressful and trying was his childhood and youth. But perhaps, and probably, this is why he is able to write with such sensitivity today. FIREBIRD relates the coming of age of a chubby, nerdy, alienated, pre-gay, geeky kid who finds little solace in his family (a deeply disturbed alcoholic mother, a passive ne'er-do-well military type father, a sister headed for incarceration) yet manages to capture moments from this distorted childhood, like expressive dancing to Stravinsky's 'Firebird' and learning to paint from his mother, to head him toward the sucessful communicator he is today.

If this sounds a bit like a book you'd rather not endure, then think again. This is one of rare memoirs that reveals all the pain and learning that life offers to the sensitive mind and then shows how the body that holds that mind can rise from the ashes (phoenix/firebird) and behold a world of art, music, and write about it like few others. The book is immensely well written. There are comic moments, childlike reveries, imagination blooming among the atrocoties of discovery of what is adulthood that are related so clearly and eloquently that they beg to be re-read again and again. Example: "A life hurtles forward, tumbles out and ahead from these twin poles: firebird and revolver, diametrical opposites like the yes and no which rule the Ouija board: twin magnetic poles which cause a kind of gyroscopic spin, advancing the motion of my tale." and "All along, the firebird watches, patient in ashes, smoldering till the hour to flame. Just one dance teaches it to believe in the brightness to come. All it ever needed was a practice run, in preparation for someday's full emblazoning."

And with words like that this reader can only recommend this experience book to all who wonder whether they are of worth. Highly and joyously recommended!

FIREBIRD is one of those books that draws in the reader and holds his/her attention. The reader is at once morbidly fascinated and horrified by the author's life experiences. The author writes about his life without self-pity or a plea for sympathy. That he had the strength to survive all he has endured in the first half of his life is inpsirational. I am proud to have known Mark Doty for two brief school years in the late sixties. Thirty-five years later Mark Doty continues to impact my life.

For several years I had read favorable reviews of Mark Doty's work and wondered if this writer was "that Mark Doty"--the smartest boy in my junior high school, the one we voted "Most Likely to Succeed."

My curiosity got the better of me when Firebird was released, since it is autobiographical, and yes, it is that Mark Doty. Those junior high years were but a blip on the screen of Mark's life (chapter seven), but his memories and descriptions of the place and the same people I knew are spot on. This book, however, is so much more than a snippet of shared history. There is nothing I could say about this book that would accurately describe its impact on me--all of my words would be an understatement.

Mark Doty's work is fine art. His prose and the structure work beautifully together. This is not another package of self-pity in which the author is intentionally pulling up emotions. Yes, I cringed and felt outrage at some of the most uncomfortable parts, but the writer soothed me and reassured me that where there is art, there is a home, a place in the world--like that which Petula Clark sings about in "Downtown."

I am proud of and pleased for Mark Doty's outstanding literary achievements. I also thank him for having the courage to write this book. Many of us who are fortunate enough to have read it are grateful and forever changed through the experience of his work of art.

I recommend it to anyone who is gay, straight, or undecided.

Doty's sixth book of poetry shows his elegant and strong style while exploring both public and private life. These poems luxuriate on the tongue and in the mind, and boldly paint vivid images in the readers' minds. Winner of a Lambda Literary Award for poetry, "Source" is a delightful example of Doty's works.

I don't mean to sound cranky, but I'm tired of hearing the words "beautiful" and "moving" in relationship to the work of Mark Doty. Of course his poems are these things, but they're much, much more. They're rigorous in their thinking; they're relentless in their questions about perception and mortality, and revolutionary in their evocation of a social and metaphysical vision. This is a poetry of ideas. It's a poetry that rolls up its sleeves and takes its reader gently--but FIRMLY--down "into the source of spring."

Mark Doty in his latest collection of poems, continues to delight and entertain us with his brilliant style of writing that is elegant, compassionate, and unabashedly, and proudly gay. These poems are of a universal language, speaking to all sexual orientations, for they are not all gay themed verses. Doty's poems are always a real pleasure to read for they speak from the heart on subjects that are important and of interest to many of us who share his same ideals, thoughts, and feelings. I have always been a fan of his poems for that reason. As he describes the degradation of Walt Whitman's vision of a democratic America in "Letter to Walt Whitman", or of the joy and entertainment that "Little Kaiser" brings to so many people in "Private Life", I can not help but smile at the joy he sees and experiences in trying to get close to Whitman, and in exploring the inner thoughts of "Little Kaiser". I have to admit I am a little prejudiced toward these two lovely poems, for each has references to companion parrots. I loved the poem, "Letter to Walt Whitman" that Doty wrote after touring Whitman's home in Camden. He was trying to find something there that would make Whitman seem more real and still alive. He did when he discovered Whitman's parrot preserved by the taxidermist's wax, and wrote, "Then one thing made you seem alive: your parrot." And in "Private Life" we learn all about "Little Kaiser" the African Grey parrot, who has been a fixture for many years at the local headshop on Commercial Street in Provincetown. Doty has a way of describing all life beings with the beauty they so rightly deserve.

This sixth book of verse by Mark Doty is one I will be returning to many, many times. The poems in this collection cover a wide variety of subjects, and this creates an opportunity for everyone to find one of interest to them that will definitely become a favorite. The several poems he writes about Provincetown, a town I have come to care about and call a second home over the past quarter century, are my favorites. Doty seems to have the same feelings for this special place that I have. It is the beauty of his words that keep me looking forward to and eagerly awaiting his next collection of poems. A Real Pleasure!!

Joe Hanssen

Faith Shearin's debut book of poems tells a compelling story. The speaker in these poems begins as a child, becomes a childless wife and ,in a final transformation, finds herself a mother. The book is full of humor and wise observation. She describes her yearning for a child this way: "I hold nothing in my arms. The nothing feels light and heavy at the same time.." The stories these poems weave together are both particular and individual (a mother's untidy kitchen, a father's eccentric love for his dog) and wonderfully universal.

Winner of the May Swenson poetry award, The Owl Question by Faith Shearin is a unique collection of brief yet evocative verse, featuring a foreword by Mark Doty (an international poet and the appointed judge for the 2002 May Swenson Award). Examining adolescence, nature, femininity, parenthood, daily life, and more, these inspirational and deftly written verses often carry a down-to-earth, narrative-event tone. My father, in middle age, falls in love with a dog./He who kicked dogs in anger when I was a child,/who liked his comb always on the same shelf,/who drank martinis to make his mind quiet./He who worked and worked/- his shirts/wrapped in plastic, his heart ironed/like a collar./He who - like many men -/ loved his children but thought the money/he made for them was more important/than the rough tweed of his presence.

Mark Doty, the award winning poet and teacher, has captured the agony and beauty of life and death in his novel Heaven's Coast. A memoir comprised of journal entries, poems and new text written over the year following the death of his partner of 12 years, Wally, from AIDS, Heaven's Coast is a tribute to love and the human spirit. This is not another "Aids Book," this is not Paul Monette (in all due respect) lamenting on lost love and bathhouses, this is an original feeling portrait of Doty at grips with the universal questions of life we all face-- Doty answers them with grace. His command of the language is truly humbling

There are many kinds of ears in this world... it will take every kind of voice to make them listen. In Heaven's Coast, Mark Doty's is a poetic, memorable voice. While writers like Paul Monette and Larry Kramer explore the personal as political, Doty seeks and finds spiritual affirmation in nature, thereby placing him among many of his literary predecessors. For critics who take Doty to task for not writing a book that encompasses all those populations affected by AIDS, this is not a political, medical, or moral treatise, but a memoir. It is an account not so much of AIDS but of love, and how HIV/AIDS impacted that love in life and death. As a writer, a widow, a survivor, Doty eloquently articulates his experience of relationship, illness, and grief. Just as the virus respects no boundaries of race, gender, orientation, income, or age, neither does grief. There may be gleaned from any person's history some meaningful wisdom, emotion, comfort, or inspiration. As a caregiver and survivor of friends lost to AIDS, I found that Doty's words gave me renewed vision and new strength.

Poet Mark Doty, writes a dazzling memoir of love, life, and passion, in Heaven's Coast.
His flowing prose and sense of timing, make this book hard to put down.

A must read for anyone, and gay men in particular.

The author seems bitten by some exotic bug. The text is both florid an prosaic, like passages from the Sears catalog. Even such ordinary subjects as getting crabs or donning a frightwig seem to become somehow more ordinary under the author's heavy hand. It's as if the author is not writing poetry at all.

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!

I find this collection to be one of Mark Doty's best. Although, I loved "Atlantis," many times I found it confusing. In "Sweet Machine," Doty evokes urban life clearly with eloquence and rich images. The last section of the book is fervent and memorable--exhaling the emptiness of sex, NYC life, and gay male angst in one breath. If you are searching for that readable, perceptive collection from a wise point of view, than this book is highly recommended.

I'm not sure what to make of this little book. It is certainly printed well, a requirement for an art book. The closeups of the Murano glass are beautiful. I wish the smaller photographs of the same glass objects in the back of the book were bigger. I got no real impression as to what the glass actually looked like. There must be bigger, more comprehensive books on Murano glass, if you cannot take a trip to the J. Paul Getty Museum, where these treasures are, or in the best of all possible worlds, go to Venice and Murano and see glass until you cannot look at another object.

The poem "Murano" though beautiful is not my favorite Doty poem. Written for his deceased poet friend Lynda Hull, the poem contrasts the permanence of Murano glass with the stench and death often associated with Venice. "Is this what becomes of art, the hard-won permanence outside of time? A struck match-head of a city, ungodly lonely in its patina of fumes and ash? Gorgeous scrap heap where no one lives, or hardly anyone."

There is no need to combine pictures and poetry. One usually dominates the other. First class poetry does not need to be illustrated. (I certainly think Mr. Doty is a first class poet; his poems often bring me much pleasure. I'm also of the opinion that poetry should be read, rather than explicated. The good poet always says what we cannot explain very well.) Fine art does not require commentary. Books like this are difficult to pull off and seldom satisfy completely. This one is no exception.

I believe that Mark Doty is one of the world's best poets, and have bought most of his books and memoirs. I bought this for my former wife as a birthday gift. She is not a poetry fan, but loves this book. She keeps it on the table in her waitng room with some other reading materials and tells me she has had eight or ten patients ask where they could buy the book. A treaure trove of stunning photographs and words side by side. Being a published poet, I would call Doty's words beautiful musings on the island of Murano, glassmaking and life. A little gem!

Mark Doty is a gifted writer, but there is such a mix of profound work and slight image in My Alexandria, that he comes with a little too much hype for someone coming to this book first. There are some exquisite images, but as an AIDS work, this is slim. This work is more about our humanity and how we deal with what we face in the world more than it is about a pandemic.

The most moving poem in this collection is, "With Animals", which is wisely used in the closing third. Some of the work is empty and rich at the same time, which is a lot like a Hostess Cupcake, but we can't live on cupcakes. When Doty really reaches, his work is utterly transforming. Here it is progressive and showcases the talent he shows later in his career.

Levine selected My Alexandria for the National Poetry Series a few years ago. And after reading this collection, you can see why it is Doty's best. It's a grim collection, focusing on death and grief, but an elegant one. "Bill's Story" alone is worth the price of the book. This is a book for anyone who loves poetry or has had AIDS tough their life. Good work Mr. Doty.

My Alexandria is undoubtedly one of my favorite volumes of poetry written within the last ten years. Doty's aesthetic reminds me of the aesthetic of the great Japanese woodblock artists -- "mono no aware" -- beauty and sadness. These are poems of haunting emotional resonance and power that are exquisitely rendered in beautifully crafted, ravishingly polished arabesques of language. Doty's sensual imagery is simply stunning, and his sense of metaphor simultaneously organic and epiphanic. The poems "Brilliance" and "Difference," in particular, are poems that I know I will remain in love with always. I highly recommend this beautiful book.

Pretentious, overdone, myopic, ca-ca

Mark Doty's poems are seriously overrated. They are overwritten, full of what reads as faked-up emotion, limited in range--both of subject and imagery. Can't think of anything to say? Just pile on more language.

I only started reading Mark Doty because he teaches at my university and I wanted to get a feel for his style before taking a course by him. I read Turtle, Swan, and only one of the poems in that collection left any impression upon me. (The title poem of the book--it touched me very deeply.) I came into Atlantis not expecting more than one poem to impress me.

I was pleasantly surprised. In this collection, he wrote many more poems about his homosexuality (as opposed to boring nature poems), people he knew, and talked more about his love of language. He talked about real things as opposed to the esoteric things poets seem to love. It's poetry that is simple enough for most to understand, yet it doesn't hit you over the head with what it's trying to say.

Mark Doty is always lyrical, and uses wonderful words, but this collection also has some poems about real life. It is well worth the price and time.