{"title":"Books by Mark Doty","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781787332430","title":"What is the Grass","description":"\u003cp\u003eMark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman’s bold, new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul and what it means to be a self. In \u003ci\u003eWhat Is the Grass\u003c\/i\u003e, Doty – a poet, a lover of men, a New Yorker, and an American – keeps company with Whitman and his mutable, landmark work, \u003ci\u003eLeaves of Grass\u003c\/i\u003e, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the legendary poet’s life and work.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eWhat is it, then, between us?\u003c\/i\u003e Whitman asks. Doty’s answer is to explore spaces tied to Whitman’s life and spaces where he finds the poet’s ghost, meditating on desire, love, and the mysterious wellsprings of the poet’s enduring work. How does a voice survive death? \u003ci\u003eWhat Is the Grass\u003c\/i\u003e is a conversation across time and space, a study of the astonishment one poet finds in the accomplishment of another, and an attempt to grasp Whitman’s deeply hopeful vision of humanity.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43205061607602,"sku":"9781787332430","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781787332430_9bee129d-e9d1-4c16-b064-a912cd132acf.jpg?v=1786025752"},{"product_id":"9781784876913","title":"Dog Years","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWhy do dogs speak so profoundly to our inner lives? \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen Mark Doty decides to adopt a dog as a companion for his dying partner, he finds himself bringing home Beau, a large golden retriever, malnourished and in need of loving care, to join Arden, the black retriever. As Beau bounds back to life, the two dogs become Mark Doty's companions, his solace, and eventually the very life force that keeps him from abandoning all hope during the darkest days - their tenacity, loyalty and love inspiring him when all else fails.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43205098143922,"sku":"9781784876913","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781784876913_d7fe1331-383a-481c-993b-8fb71de05dcd.jpg?v=1786025609"},{"product_id":"9780224099837","title":"Deep Lane","description":"\u003cp\u003eMark Doty’s poetry has long been celebrated for its risk and candour, an ability to find transcendent beauty even in the mundane and grievous, an unflinching eye that – as Philip Levine says – ‘looks away from nothing’. In the poems of \u003ci\u003eDeep Lane\u003c\/i\u003e the stakes are higher: there is more to lose than ever before, and there is more for us to gain. ‘Pure appetite,’ he writes ironically early in the collection, ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that.’ And the following poem answers: \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDown there the little star-nosed engine of desire \u003cbr\u003eat work all night, secretive: in the  morning\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ea new line running across the wet grass, near the surface, \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003elike a vein. Don’t you wish the road of excess \u003cbr\u003eled to the palace of wisdom, wouldn’t that be nice? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eDeep Lane\u003c\/i\u003e is a book of descents: into the earth beneath the garden, into the dark substrata of a life.  But these poems seek repair, finally, through the possibilities that sustain the speaker above ground: gardens and animals; the pleasure of seeing; the world tuned by the word. Time and again, an image of immolation and sacrifice is undercut by the fierce fortitude of nature: nature that is not just a solace but a potent antidote and cure. Ranging from agony to rapture, from great depths to hard-won heights, these are poems of grace and nobility.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56227172122997,"sku":"9780224099837","price":10.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780224099837_4a6ade26-7c4c-4960-9706-a2660cd58132.jpg?v=1786012203"},{"product_id":"firebird","title":"Firebird","description":"This is the story of a ten-year-old in top hat, cane and a red chiffon scarf, interrupted while belting out Judy Garland's 'Get Happy' by an alarmed mother at the bedroom door exclaiming, in shame and exasperation: 'Son, you're a boy.'A self-confessed 'chubby smart bookish sissy with glasses and a Southern accent', Mark Doty grew up on the move, the family following his father's engineering work across America - from Memphis to Tucson to Titusville, Florida and Northern California. With his rebellious sister already heading for abortions, carnie jobs, credit-card fraud and prison, and his fragile, artistic mother slowly drinking herself to death, Mark has quite enough troubles without discovering that his dawning sexuality is The Wrong One. Attracted not to baseball gloves or space travel but to textiles and opera, theatre and free-form dance, his confusion and fear are shared by those around him, as he makes his way into the world to the sound of Petula Clark singing 'Downtown'. After experiments with drugs, psychedelia and heterosexuality he reaches the age of majority and finally acknowledges and accepts the ten-year-old Judy Garland in himself: that he is a gay man, emerging, radiant and new, from his own ashes. It is a triumphant transformation","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57466548978037,"sku":"9780099283393","price":15.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780099283393.jpg?v=1785654607"},{"product_id":"heavens-coast","title":"Heaven's Coast","description":"HEAVEN'S COAST is an anatomy of loss: tender, heartbreaking, consoling and, ultimately, incredibly moving. Beginning with the first onset of AIDS and its lengthening shadow over a blissful relationship, the book follows the shifting patterns between two loves as the illness takes hold - the change in them and the change in the way they perceive the world, through the lens of grief. Doty examines the nature of AIDS as opposed to other illnesses, the responses of society, the frustration of medical care and the exhausting - and occasionally uplifting - burden of caring for the dying at home.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57466614415733,"sku":"9780099731610","price":15.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780099731610.jpg?v=1785654672"},{"product_id":"still-life-with-oysters-and-lemon","title":"Still Life with Oysters and Lemon","description":"An account of the poet author's love affair with Dutch art, and the consolations and ecstasies of the objects we gather on our way through life. We begin standing in the Met in front of a painting by Jan Davidsz de Heem: Still Life with Oysters and Lemon. Looking almost more closely than we can bear at this image from the 17th century, Doty attempts to tell us everything it holds, from pigments to forms, and above all, meaning.   This confrontation with beauty is one of many that shapes his life, from the pinwheel peppermints that emerge from his grandma's purse in his Tennessee childhood to the cracked china platter that graces the mantelpiece in the home he shares with his dying husband. But it is Dutch still-life painting that seems to have the most to tell him. This book is his record of years spent looking closely at bunched asparagus, translucent wine glasses, curling lemon peel and the bloom on grapes.   In a brief, lucid, powerfully concentrated narrative, which tells the story of a life of self-discovery and an avid gaze, Mark Doty writes with poetic specificity and painterly clarity. In his loving description of reality, we begin to see that simply looking can be the most tender reverence.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57507864510837,"sku":"9781805680437","price":12.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781805680437.jpg?v=1792425208"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-mark-doty.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}