“Elegant, plain-spoken, and unflinching, Mark Doty’s poems . . . invite us to share their ferocious compassion.”―National Book Award, judges’ citation for Fire to FireMark Doty’s poetry has long been celebrated for its risk and candor, an ability to find transcendent beauty even in the mundane and grievous, an unflinching eye that―as Philip Levine says―“looks away from nothing.” In the poems of Deep Lane the stakes are higher: there is more to lose than ever before, and there is more for us to gain. “Pure appetite,” he writes ironically early in the collection, “I wouldn’t know anything about that.” And the following poem answers:Down there the little star-nosed engine of desireat work all night, secretive: in the morninga new line running across the wet grass, near the surface,like a vein.
