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 come swerving quick on the branching towers, so the blooms sway with the heft of hungers indistinguishable, now, from the blossoms."

"Sometimes we wake not knowing how we came to lie here, or who has crowned us with these temporary, precious stones."

He reveals the survivor's wonder and guilt when he survives when so many friends and a lover die in the great AIDS crisis:

"And why did a god so invested in permanence choose so fragile a medium, the last material he might expect to last?"

Doty is not afraid to come close to the sentimental when talking about Beau and Arden, his dogs, as they age through their briefer lives and die before he was ready.

Every poems is crafted for this world. And while Doty acknowledges the great rift created by the 1970s Postmodern experimentation and loss of faith in language, he believes in the power of words well-chosen to carry us through our individual and collective search for meaning: He knows the surprise that comes when the poem reaches beyond what the poet thought he wanted:

"The poem wants the impossible; the poem wants a name for the kind nothing at the core of time,"

Read this collection. You will be heartbroken at times, but that is our lot. And Doty is a great voice and his gentle but courageous presence is welcome on this journey.

( )

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. ( )

It’s that time of year again: A late flu is rampant and poetry is in the air. If you’re destined to spend early spring sniffling in bed, at least do it with some new poetry.

Of course, Mark Doty isn’t the sort of poet whose only attention comes from poetry readers. He’s also quite well-known for his work in memoirs, the most recent of which, Dog Years, is a crossover hit with, obviously, dog people. But to miss out on Doty’s well-wrought poems is to miss the best American poetry has to offer. His new poems in Fire to Fire, as well as those selected from the last 25 years, are more closely aligned with Walt Whitman (who appears as, rightly enough, an apparition) than with more obscure precedents.

Lush language and attention to the details of the world—smell, color, the proper names of things—combine with Doty’s obsession for questioning the meaning of everything. These traits come together to produce an analysis of the difference between American and British poetry (while taking a funny shot at Wordsworth) in “Pipistrelle.”

Doty and “Charles,” a British poet, have both seen a bat flying through the trees at dusk outside an inn. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, Doty questions every aspect of his poem even as he writes it, wishing for “a lean / meditative evocation of what threaded / over our wondering heads,” and eventually questioning even his surrender to his obsession to “worry my little aerial friend / with a freight not precisely his.” Meanwhile, his British friend says, “Listen to my poem.”

Doty isn’t one to take the easier, softer way. Never has been.

The new poems, many of them “theories” of almost everything, are wonderful; packaged alongside a selection of the best from Doty’s previous collections, this becomes a volume worthy of slow reflection. Several favorites are included here, among them “Days of 1981,” from the last truly innocent time before HIV/AIDS, and “Fog,” about learning to live in world that includes sickness, death and grief.

And the very best Mark Doty poem yet, “Visitation,” in which a whale swims us with him past grief: “What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?”

SN&R Review: http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/Content?oid=645574 ( )