“It sounds like a simple thing, to say what you
see,” Mark Doty begins. “But try to find words for the shades of a mottled
sassafras leaf, or the reflectivity of a bay on an August morning, or the very
beginnings of desire stirring in the gaze of someone looking right into your
eyes . . .” Doty finds refuge in the sensory experience found in poems by
Blake, Whitman, Bishop, and others. The
Art of Description is an invaluable book by one of America’s most revered
writers and teachers.
PRAISE FOR MARK DOTY:
“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 lead 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.”
