It was part of Walt Whitman's extraordinary innovation with Leaves of Grass to close time and space, to bring his observations and a sense of intimacy to each reader who finds him. It feels perfectly natural that acclaimed poet and memoirist Mark Doty (Dog Years; Still Life with Oysters and Lemon; Deep Lane) chooses to receive, interpret and muse upon these transmissions with What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life.
Doty, like Whitman, is gifted with words, a lover of beauty and of men, a New Yorker. He feels haunted by the elder poet, sees and smells him in the museum of Whitman's home, again encounters his ghost "above the shoulders of a bedmate on a winter afternoon early in the twenty-first century, in an apartment tower in Hell's Kitchen." What Is the Grass is a close reading of Whitman's great work, but also of American poetry, same-sex love, the exuberance of the physical body, myriad cultural shifts and Doty's own life.
As is his habit, Doty's mind on the page wanders widely. Readers should be prepared to dig out a copy of Leaves of Grass (or find one: "there is a copy of the Leaves in every used bookstore, everywhere in the nation, count on it") upon reading this book, which makes an indispensable companion and guide. Arriving finally at "the poet's greatest glory, and the exegete's inescapable defeat," in the end, Doty reminds us that Whitman's "words accomplish what words cannot," and exits quietly. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia