School of the Arts
Mark Doty
  • Published: 15 March 2005
  • ISBN: 9780224075183
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 112
  • RRP: $32.99

School of the Arts

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A new collection from one of America's most popular poets.

'When I say I hate time, Paul says
how else could we find depth
of character, or grow souls?'

The darkly graceful poems in Mark Doty's seventh collection explore the ways in which we are educated by the implacable powers of time and desire. The world constantly renews itself, and the new brings both possibility and erasure. Given the limits of our own bodies, how are we to live within the inevitability of despair?

This is the plainest of Doty's books, its language stripped and humbled. But whatever depths are sounded in these poems, their humane and open music sustains. Art itself instructs us. Lucian Freud's startling renditions of human skin, Virginia Woolf's ecstatic depiction of consciousness, Caravaggio's only too real people elevated to difficult glory - all turn the light of human intelligence upon 'the night of time'.

Formally inventive, warm, at once witty and disconsolate, School of the Arts represents a poet reinventing his own voice at midlife, finding a way through a troubled passage. Acutely attentive, insistently alive, this is a book of 'fierce vulnerability'.
  • Published: 15 March 2005
  • ISBN: 9780224075183
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 112
  • RRP: $32.99
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About the author

Mark Doty

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.

portrait photo of Mark Doty

Also by Mark Doty

What is the Grass
Deep Lane
Theories and Apparitions
Dog Years
Firebird
Heaven's Coast
My Alexandria
See all

Praise for School of the Arts

Mark Doty is one of the major figures in contemporary American poetry, and a new book from him is always an event

John Killick, The North

The American poet Mark Doty dissents from the assumption that a plain style is more truthful than an elaborate one. Some poets are hypnotised by language and get caught flat-footed, but Doty is witty and quick... Wonderful

Alan Marshall, Daily Telegraph

Bishop's influence is apparent in Doty's shape-shifting, peripatetic style, his careful accumulation of sharply observed detail. While Doty has inherited from James Merrill, he shares somethign of the Bishop/Moore fondness for eccentric syntax, as well as their strength of phrasing

Catriona O'Reilly, Times Literary Supplement

Doty’s is a land of plenty, his poems celebrate abundance

Colm Toibin, London Review of Books