Deep Lane: Poems - Tapa dura

Doty remains elegiac and continues to attend to beauty. He also does some of his best work yet as a nature poet.

This collection will win awards.--Maggie Galehouse

Doty is able to weave philosophical inquiry, personal anecdote, and awe at people and nature into a voice that is simultaneously warm and tinged with a useful measure of doubt.--Craig Morgan Teicher

His best work yet...astute, contemplative and deeply moving.--Elizabeth Lund

Mark Doty writes with absolute exactitude, with one eye on the ideal or absolute and one on the real; the ghost of Walt Whitman on one hand, and a laundromat on 16th Street in New York on the other. There is not a finer, more delicate, more sublime poet writing today in the English language. It's a poet's job to show us what we knew but never saw before; and it's a poet's job to tell us over and over what love is. Doty is this poet.--Gerald Stern

One of the things that has been constant about Mark Doty's work, poetry and prose, is his intense search for the exact word or phrase, of whatever issue, which leads him (and us) into the very furnace of meaning within the human story. It might be the color of the inside of a shell of a mussel found on the beach; it might be the recognition that the heart that feels close to dying might not die, if the will can be fed just a little.--Mary Oliver

Mark Doty's most representative poems are tender, intimate, open, and true. They have their roots in the essential dailiness of this life, with its ritual round of small duties and encounters, and they open out . . . into a world of embracing sympathy, camaraderie, and understanding. With his clarity of vision and great heart, Doty stands among us an emblematic and shining presence.--Stanley Kunitz

Deep Lane 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: art and ardor, animals and gardens, the pleasure of seeing, the world tuned by the word. From Deep Lane Down there the little star-nosed engine of desire at work all night, secretive: in the morning a new line running across the wet grass, near the surface, like a vein. Don t you wish the road of excess led to the palace of wisdom, wouldn t that be nice?"