Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | 921 DOTY 1999 | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
"A beautifully written, hallucinatorily evocative memoir of growing up gay in baby-boom America." -- Newsweek
In his powerful autobiography, Firebird, Mark Doty tells the story of a ten-year-old in a top hat, cane, and red chiffon scarf, interrupted while belting out Judy Garland's "Get Happy" by his alarmed mother at the bedroom door, exclaiming, "Son, you're a boy!"
Firebird presents us with a heroic little boy who has quite enough worries without discovering that his dawning sexuality is the Wrong One. A self-confessed "chubby smart bookish sissy with glasses and a Southern accent," Doty grew up on the move, the family following his father's engineering work across America-from Tennessee to Arizona, Florida to California. A lyrical, heartbreaking comedy of one family's dissolution through the corrosive powers of alcohol, sorrow, and thwarted desire, Firebird is also a wry evocation of childhood's pleasures and terrors, a comic tour of American suburban life, and a testament to the transformative power of art.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Doty, an award-winning poet (Atlantis) and memoirist (Heaven's Coast) has penned an autobiography of his early years that, while beautifully and sensitively written, is more moving intellectually than emotionally. Using his family history and personal recollections to create a snapshot of the artist as a young child and beyond, Doty portrays the rocky emotional and psychological domestic terrain of his youth and adolescence: his family moved frequently; his mother was severely alcoholic; he hid his crushes on other boys from his homophobic parents while his sister became embroiled in a bad marriage and was imprisoned for breaking into and burglarizing a pharmacy. Doty's personal material is sometimes wrenchingÄat the story's climax, his mother, drunk, holds him at gunpointÄbut he is at his best when describing his relationship to the idea of beauty and how it influenced his growth as an artist. From watching monster movies and listening to classical music as a child to participating in drama class and singing along to pop songs such as Petula Clark's "Downtown" as he grew older, Doty details his evolution as a poet. Through it all, he casts his tragic relationship with his mother as a touchstone for his love of art, relating how he moved from his childhood recognition that "my relationship with my mother is immense... and occupies so much space I can barely see around it" to an adult understanding that she "taught me the things that would save me, and then... she taught me I wasn't worth saving." In the end, Doty's story illuminates his poetry, but it doesn't match its power. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A bittersweet portrait of the artist as a young homosexual, coming to terms with his parents and finding that ``the thing that harms turns out, sometimes, to be the very thing that restores.'' After writing through the death of his lover in his previous memoir, Heaven's Coast (1996), poet Mark Doty uses the visual tricks of a 17th-century Dutch perspective box as a metaphors for a series of linked autobiographical essays. In the same way the box distorts finely modeled objects so that they appear in perspective when viewed through a lens, so does Doty hope to bring order to the uncertain memories and unresolved emotional turmoil of a peripatetic middle-class youth in the '50s and early '60s, when his temperamental father built missile silos in the Arizona desert while his prodigal sister spent time in jail, his mother drank herself to death, and the incipient poet found aesthetic ecstasy dancing to Stravinsky's Firebird Suite. Doty is most sympathetic this world's eccentrics, misfits, and social rebels, from his mother's meditating art teacher to the nameless gnome of Moon Valley, a Tucson hermit whose fantastic desert playground remains hidden among the city's suburban sprawl, and finally to Doty's sister Sally, who, after her Jesus-freak husband takes off with a younger girl in the church choir, avenges herself on the male world as a pocket-picking prostitute, only to straighten up and fly right after finding a true gentleman in a bar. There's the standard sexual squirming, trite conformity, and barely repressed violence common to Eisenhower-era bildungsromans, as well as a beautifully balanced take on Doty's mother's unfulfilled life. All that, and some hilarious, Harvey Fierstein pratfalls in which Doty figures out that he's gay, relieve Doty's naval-gazing discursions on art, writing, and the making of a poet. A short, effusive, and wisely compassionate backward glance on a life that, while less than the sum of its parts, has healed as much as it has hurt.
Booklist Review
Doty's much-honored poetry is animated by his abiding faith in beauty, and now, in this exquisitely composed boyhood memoir, he tells the story of how art saved his life. A smart and dreamy child, Doty was destined to live outside the parameters of an ordinary life. His parents moved with dizzying frequency, condemning him to repeatedly reenact the role of the new kid at school. But what really set him apart was his homosexuality. Aware that his behavior was not typically boylike, and that his feelings about his own sex were taboo, he puzzled things out on his own, and began to discern the transformative powers of literature, movies, and music. He read incessantly, empathized with the plight of monsters in horror films, and responded intuitively to the daring of Stravinsky and the sorrow of Judy Garland. Doty writes about these private rites of passage with arresting veracity, and his gentle unveiling of the heart of a gay child is an act of significant revelation. His luminous portrait of the artist as a young man also illuminates the currents of his times and contains a haunting family history. This is memoir at its best. --Donna Seaman
Library Journal Review
A bright yet awkward and misunderstood child finds both solace and amusement in monster movies, wishing he were as powerful as the Amazing Colossal Man (but wondering "where did he find that immense loincloth which conceals his shame?"). Later, as an overweight, gay teenager, the same boy takes comfort in Petula Clark's "Downtown" and its promise of big-city excitement. An argument with his father over hair length leads to a trip to the barber shop and then a half-hearted suicide attempt, after which his parents do what the boy has wanted them to do all along, i.e., leave him alone. These and dozens of other crisply outlined, resonant images depict the early life of Doty, now one of the most successful poets of his generation, whose third volume of poems, My Alexandria, won the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award. Doty's themeÄthat which hurts the most also helps the mostÄis not new, though his luminous, bittersweet telling of it is. Evidently, the firebird of myth can indeed rise from its ashes, and here it soars magically.ÄDavid Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Prelude: Perspective Box | p. 1 |
Part 1 Rainbow Girls | p. 11 |
A Book of Archaeology | p. 27 |
Beast from the Year 5000 | p. 45 |
Mikey | p. 55 |
Firebird | p. 63 |
Seventy-six Trombones | p. 83 |
Part 2 Guest from Nowhere | p. 105 |
Valley of the Moon | p. 117 |
Samson in the Temple | p. 137 |
Wear Your Love Like Heaven | p. 149 |
Sorrowful Mother | p. 171 |
Fanfare and Finale: Firebird | p. 179 |
Acknowledgments | p. 199 |