Source

This bold, wide-ranging new collection - Mark Doty's sixth book of poems - demonstrates the unmistakable lyricism, fierce observation, and force of feeling that has made his poems matter to readers on both sides of the Atlantic. The new poems in Source deepen Doty's exploration of the paradox of selfhood. Are we edgeless and unbounded, or locked within our own singularity? What is it to be one person in the world's great multiplicity of selves? Source investigates matters of public life - the degradation of Walt Whitman's vision of a democratic America; a child's display of longing on a New York sidewalk; Provincetown's restless summer crowds. But the poems also turn toward the realm of private struggle: how the self is claimed and lost through desire, how the dapple of light on a hotel windowsill makes a claim for the life of the soul. Source is a complex, boldly coloured self-portrait; its muscular lines argue fiercely with the fact of limit and pulse with the drama of perception, the quest for forging meaning.