Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems

Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems gathers work from across Mark Doty's first seven books of poetry, spanning about twenty years, together with a substantial group of new poems. Doty's recurring subjects run through the collection: mortality and loss, the passing beauty of the physical world, the transforming power of desire, and the ways art gives shape and meaning to human lives. Some poems dwell on grief and the people he has lost, while others turn their attention to the sea, to animals, to paintings and to the textures of everyday life. His style moves easily between plain speech and richly detailed description. Read together, the poems trace the development of one of the best-known voices in contemporary American poetry over two decades. The collection won the 2008 National Book Award for Poetry.