Fire to Fire by Mark DotyHarper Perennial, 2009 (originally HarperCollins, 2008)

I saw Mark Doty read at The Center last month and was reminded how much I like him, and why—his work is so full of observation and exquisite description and shining moments and everyday wonders. This collection of poems, which includes new work and selections from previous books, is just what I want to be reading right now, deeply satisfying from the very beginning, which is a poem about writing a poem and Doty’s sensibility of detailed observation, of “filling in the tale” (3). I love that so many of Doty’s poems are New York City poems, love that I can picture the intersections and cross-streets (8th Ave and 20th, 7th Ave and 21st), love that he writes about the guy “in the dingy passageway/to the L yesterday singing early Beatles with a radical purity” (19). In “Theory of Beauty (Greenwich Avenue),” Doty writes “that this is the city’s particular signature/the range of possibilities within any single set,” and he captures that range, and the individuals within it, wonderfully (23-24). Other highlights among his new poems are “Theory of Marriage” and “Theory of Marriage (The Hug),” the sweetness and humor of the first (the story of a trip to a qi gong parlor) and the tenderness of the second (I’m a sucker for dog-stories, though it’s more than that, of course). Reading the older poems—most of which I’ve read before—is also a delight, the bits I remember from first reading in 2004, 2005, 2007, and the bits I remember dimly, or not at all. “With Animals,” which I remembered only vaguely, brought tears to my eyes on the F train. Later, I smiled at “Chanteuse” (“What was our city/but wonderful detail?”) and “The Advent Calendars” (wintry and wonderful, especially the image of “The world gone/general, unmoored, white”) (pp 116, 125), and oh, lots more.