Author:Mark Doty
Mark Doty’s poetry has long been celebrated for its risk and candour, an ability to find transcendent beauty even in the mundane and grievous, an unflinching eye that – as Philip Levine says – ‘looks away from nothing’. In the poems of Deep Lane the stakes are higher: there is more to lose than ever before, and there is more for us to gain. ‘Pure appetite,’ he writes ironically early in the collection, ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that.’ And the following poem answers:
Down there the little star-nosed engine of desire
at work all night, secretive: in the morning
a new line running across the wet grass, near the surface,
like a vein. Don’t you wish the road of excess
led to the palace of wisdom, wouldn’t that be nice?
Deep Lane is a book of descents: into the earth beneath the garden, into the dark substrata of a life. But these poems seek repair, finally, through the possibilities that sustain the speaker above ground: gardens and animals; the pleasure of seeing; the world tuned by the word. Time and again, an image of immolation and sacrifice is undercut by the fierce fortitude of nature: nature that is not just a solace but a potent antidote and cure. Ranging from agony to rapture, from great depths to hard-won heights, these are poems of grace and nobility.
Deep Lane, [Doty’s] best work yet, is astute, contemplative and deeply moving.
—— Washington PostMark Doty’s ninth collection displays his customary gift for emphatic observation, collapsing the distance between poet and subject to establish an observance of both secular and sexual mysteries.
—— W N Herbert , Literary ReviewFull of urban romanticism, with images of delving and desire and the search for “the wild unsayable”, mixed in with wonderings about his parents.
—— John Walsh , IndependentThe collection is permeated with a sense of finding depth, travelling downward and into roots.
—— Charlotte Runcie , Daily TelegraphHis masterpiece
—— Los Angeles TimesHas extraordinary value as a document over and above its importance as literature. The friendly dispassionateness of the book, the amplitude, the final perfection of clearness, make it as satisfying as a Dürer drawing
—— ObserverAn absorbing, well-observed, almost film-like telling of a family in Lubeck over a generation or two
—— IndependentA detailed portrait of a family and its destructive impact
—— New York TimesOne of the greatest things a novel can do is to create a world - and this is one of the most richly evoked and inhabited of all
—— Michael Frayn , WeekHis [Wood’s] concept of literature is generous, inclusive and fundamentally democratic.
—— Michael Lindgren , Washington PostFew can match Welsh's verve for spinning a yarn, for putting you inside the minds of characters that are by turn grotesque, joyful, hilarious and – crucially – utterly compelling.
—— Sam Parker , EsquireA Decent Ride, while his most comedic novel, is also his darkest.
—— David Whitehouse , ShortlistMore furious, filthy brilliance from Welsh.
—— Forever SportsPacked with filthy charm and characters old and new, it was a comic triumph with plenty of depth through its exploitation of celebrity culture and the treatment of sex workers.
—— Rowena McIntosh , The ListWelsh carries realism to its limits and sometimes beyond… [He] Creates a world more real than a great many worlds we enter in today’s fiction.
—— Patrick Anderson , Washington PostA gripping read that fans of Dorothy Koomson will love
—— CloserI laughed aloud at this funny, outrageous story of a girl from Wolverhampton council estate who reinvents herself as Dolly Wilde
—— Woman & Homeas irreverent, amusing and vibrant as Moran herself
—— GQrowdy and fearless ... sloppy, big-hearted and alive in all the right ways
—— New York TimesMs. Moran['s] ... funny and cheerfully dirty coming-of-age novel has a hard kernel of class awareness ... sloppy, big-hearted and alive in all the right ways.
—— Dwight Garner , New York Timesthere’s so much real feeling too. Johanna’s vulnerability and bravado, as she moves out of her world and falls in love is beautifully done’ or ‘ and running through it all, with a visceral power that most writers should envy, is the shame and grinding anxiety of being poor
—— Sunday TimesMoran also writes brilliantly about music, and especially about what music can do. She carries Johanna through this novel with incredible verve, extravagant candour, and a lot of heart. Johanna is … a wonderful heroine. A heroine who cares, who bravely sallies forth and makes things happen, who gives of herself, who is refreshingly unashamed. She’s so confident, it’s glorious
—— The Independent on Sundayan entertaining read, with Moran in fine voice – hilarious, wild, imaginative and highly valuable…Moran is in danger of becoming to female masturbation what Keats was to Nightingales…
—— Barbara Ellen , The Observerrude, big-hearted, wise-cracking novel…so filthy she’ll make you blush
—— Christina Patterson , The Sunday TimesThis is going to be a bestseller…A sharp, hilarious and controversial read
—— The BooksellerAli Smith is a master of language. Vigorous, vivid writing that is Ali Smith incarnate
—— Alice Thompson , HeraldIngeniously conceived, gloriously inventive
—— NPRDizzyingly ambitious . . . endlessly artful, creating work that feels infinite in its scope and intimate at the same time. [A] swirling panoramic
—— AtlanticBrilliant . . . the sort of death-defying storytelling acrobatics that don't seem entirely possible
—— Washington PostHaving read this now twice, in both directions so to speak, I've decided - and I do not write this flippantly - that Ali Smith is a genius
—— Susan McCallum , LA Review of BooksApproaches the world as only a novel can. The book moves not so much in a straight line as in a twisting helix pattern . . . delivers the heat of life and the return of beauty in the face of loss
—— Kenneth Miller , Everyday EbookA unique conversation between past and present
—— Milwaukee JournalWildly inventive . . . lyrical, fresh
—— Bustle Magazine
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