Mark Doty

Mark Doty is the author of Firebird, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon and Source.

Two Poems

Mark Doty, 21 September 2000

Principalities of June

Original light broke apart, the Gnostics say, when time began,

singular radiance fractioned into form – an easy theory

to believe, in early summer, when that first performance

seems repeated daily. Though wouldn’t it mean each fracturing took us

that much further from heaven? Not in this town,

not in June: harbour and cloudbank, white...

Poem: ‘Manhattan: Luminism’

Mark Doty, 20 January 2000

The sign said immunology but I readilluminology: and look,

heaven is a platinum latitude over Fifth, fogged result of sun-brushed

steel, pearl dimensions. Cézanne: ‘We are an iridescent chaos.’

*

Balcony over Lexington, May evening,

fog wreath’d towers, gothic dome lit from within, monument of our aspirations

turned hollow, abandoned

somehow. And later, in the...

Creases and Flecks: Mark Doty

Laura Quinney, 3 October 2002

Mark Doty specialises in ekphrasis. The word once meant the description of a work of visual art within a poem, but has come to mean poetic description more generally. Sometimes Doty describes a...

Read more reviews

A House Full of No One

Colm Tóibín, 6 February 1997

The words ‘HIV Positive’ and ‘Aids’ do not appear in the poems in Mark Doty’s My Alexandria (1995); instead, they hover in the spaces between the other words, and...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences