Sweet Machine | 
 enlarge | Manufacturer: HarperCollins e-books
Category: EBooks
List Price: $9.95
Buy New: $7.96
You Save: $1.99 (20%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 32314
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 132
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
ASIN: B000W93ADS
Publication Date: November 27, 2007
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
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Product Description
Mark Doty's last two award-winning collections of poetry, as well as his acclaimed memoir Heaven's Coast, used the devastation of AIDS as a lens through which to consider questions of loss, love and identity. The poems in his new collection, Sweet Machine, see the world from a new, hard-won perspective: A coming back to life, after so much death, a way of seeing the body's "sweet machine" not simply as a time bomb, but also as a vibrant, sensual, living thing. These poems are themselves "sweet machines"--lyrical, exuberant and joyous--and they mark yet another milestone in the extraordinary career of one of our most distinguished and accomplished poets.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Immortal October 11, 2003
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Rarely do you come across a poet able to maintain a voice as pure and frank as Mark Doty's. He approaches prevalent themes such as grief, loss, and love with enchanting diction, virtue, and elegance. Beyond his ability to achieve the perfect balance of lyric, image, narrative, mystery, and form, his unwavering beauty (I think) lies somewhere in the synergy of candor and compassion, as in the ending of one of my favorite poems (a direct-address to a lover who has passed and returns in a dream) "Bless you. You came back, so I could see you once more, plainly, so I could rest against you without thinking this happiness lessened anything, without thinking you were alive again." In short, his poems are brimming with that rare magic that make poets want to write.
Doty casts his spell June 18, 2003
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a beautiful book, full of poems that call the reader to be more fully human, more empathetic, more intelligent, more intensely alive. Doty is a writer's writer, in that his work sensitizes the reader to the magical powers of language as well as to the beauty and richness of the world he writes about with such passion. Thank you, Mark Doty!
 Lovely as a Trinket in a Pawn Shop November 29, 2000
2 out of 10 found this review helpful
The author seems bitten by some exotic bug. The text is both florid an prosaic, like passages from the Sears catalog. Even such ordinary subjects as getting crabs or donning a frightwig seem to become somehow more ordinary under the author's heavy hand. It's as if the author is not writing poetry at all.
Broken, the better to glitter October 31, 2000
7 out of 12 found this review helpful
Mark Doty is passionately in love with frivolity, and that is a good thing. In about half the poems in this book, he joyously celebrates the frivolous -- fleeting beauty, the unnecessary (but is it really?) the joy of delicacy and frailty. His style fits his subject well -- at times it feels light enough to simply float off the page, wisp away into nothingness. This book is beautifully lyrical, sweet and light poetry. Favorites are "White Kimono", "Lilies in New York", and, especially, "Messiah(Christmas Portions".With that in mind, I think my favorite poems in the book come towards the end, when he settles down a bit. Maybe this is just more my style and sensibility. Either way, Doty shows hints of a great range and ability. His form stays pretty constant -- short lines, grouped in threes, building 2-3 page poems that have both of the sense of being long and of flying by. Here is a poet who loves language, and flaunts it -- and I mean that in the best way imaginable. While his work may not be incredibly important, thank God that not all good poetry has to be incredibly important. Here are poems of joyride and dance. Enjoy. A sample poem: CONCERNING SOME RECENT CRITICISM OF HIS WORK --Glaze and shimmer, luster and gleam, can't he think of anything but all that sheen? --No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins. -- if you'd like to discuss these poems, or poetry, books, anything else with me, e-mail me at williekrischke@hotmail.com.
wondrous. June 12, 2000
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
i was so very happy when this book came out - hard to follow up to atlantis, but this book manages to soar to new heights in its lyric intensity and overall emotional arc. mature and beautiful, sewn with expertise and true poetic vision.
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