What is the Grass
Formats & editions
- Published: 2 July 2020
- ISBN: 9781473577985
- Imprint: Vintage Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 304
Doty writes about his [Walt Whitman’s] life with a rare warmth and candour…. He reads with care, in the sense of both attentiveness and love.
Tristram Fane Saunders, Daily Telegraph
To describe a new book as ‘eagerly awaited' is almost unpardonable. Yet Mark Doty's What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life is exactly that… Doty is an extraordinarily fine writer whose every word sings on the page. Poetry has a tendency to come into its own at exceptional times such as our own… Arguably there couldn't be a more apt context for Doty's book about his lifelong exploration of — and through — the great American poet Walt Whitman… This is an exceptional, passionate memoir of reading, and of a poet's lifelong work of understanding self and the world.
Fiona Sampson, Spectator