What is the Grass

(Hardback)

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Effortlessly blending biography, criticism, and memoir, prize-winning poet Mark Doty explores his personal quest for Walt Whitman Mark 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 What Is the Grass, Doty - a poet, a lover of men, a New Yorker, and an American - keeps company with Whitman and his mutable, landmark work, Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the legendary poet's life and work. What is it, then, between us 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 What Is the Grass 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.

Reviews

Doty is an extraordinarily fine writer whose every word sings on the page There certainly couldnt be a more appropriate explorer [of Whitman] than Doty, as both a leading North American poet and a memoirist and prose writer of exceptional grace and depth This is an exceptional, passionate memoir of reading, and of a poets lifelong work of understanding self and the world. -- Fiona Sampson * Spectator *
Mark Doty's deeply personal love letter to Walt Whitman, belongs in the pantheon...beside Ted Hughess Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being and Don Patersons Reading Shakespeares Sonnets As admirers of his poetry and memoirs will know, Doty writes about his life with a rare warmth and candour. He makes you lean forward to listen He reads with care, in the sense of both attentiveness and love. -- Tristram Fane Saunders * Daily Telegraph *
Marvellous. He sends you straight back to the text, makes you feel like you're returning to an old love... In a fit of enchantment. -- Abhrajyoti Chakraborty * Guardian *
Doty is one of the most compelling modern singers of 'the body electric' and in What is the Grass he has produced an elegant meditation on the great founding father of American poetry... Doty helps us feel the touch and connection of great art afresh. It is a warmly affecting performance. -- David Wheatley * Literary Review *
Mark Doty has written a warm and intelligent account of Whitman... [Doty's] poems are a highly engaging mixture of the quotidian and the numinous. -- Seamus Perry * Times Literary Supplement *

Author Bio

Mark Doty is the author of more than ten volumes of poetry and three memoirs. His many honours include the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and, in the UK, the T. S. Eliot Prize. He is a professor at Rutgers University and lives in New York City.