When he died in 1892 Whitman was still rewriting the epochal Leaves of Grass, first self-published in 1855. The poem wants to accompany us in the direction of awakening’. This genre-crossing book leads us on an exploration of Whitman’s work, regarding ‘Song of Myself’ as ‘a call to change our way of seeing self and other, a persuasive text that aims to revise our understandings of the most basic things. There certainly couldn’t be a more appropriate explorer than Doty, as both a leading North American poet and a memoirist and prose writer of exceptional grace and depth. 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. William Wordsworth’s 250th anniversary has provoked media reflections on his consolatory power a recently established Poetry Pharmacy is receiving attention and social media brims with poems and poets attempting to make sense of what’s happening to us. Poetry has a tendency to come into its own at exceptional times such as our own. It’s not just that Doty is an extraordinarily fine writer whose every word sings on the page. Yet Mark Doty’s What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life is exactly that. To describe a new book as ‘eagerly awaited’ is almost unpardonable.
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