<b>Doty is an extraordinarily fine writer whose every word sings on the page</b>… <b>There certainly couldn’t be a more appropriate explorer</b> [<b>of Whitman</b>] <b>than Doty</b>, as both a leading North American poet and a memoirist and prose writer of exceptional grace and depth… <b>This is an exceptional, passionate memoir of reading, and of a poet’s lifelong work of understanding self and the world</b>.
- Fiona Sampson, Spectator
<b>Mark Doty's deeply personal love letter to Walt Whitman, belongs in the pantheon</b>...<b>beside Ted Hughes’s <i>Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being</i> and Don Paterson’s <i>Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets</i></b>… As admirers of his poetry and memoirs will know, Doty writes about his life with a rare warmth and candour. <b>He makes you lean forward to listen</b>… He reads with care, in the sense of both attentiveness and love.
- Tristram Fane Saunders, Daily Telegraph
Marvellous. He sends you straight back to the text, makes you feel like you're returning to an old love... In a fit of enchantment.
- Abhrajyoti Chakraborty, Guardian
Doty is one of the most compelling modern singers of 'the body electric' and in <i>What is the Grass </i>he has produced an elegant meditation on the great founding father of American poetry... Doty helps us feel the touch and connection of great art afresh. It is a warmly affecting performance.
- David Wheatley, Literary Review
Mark Doty has written a warm and intelligent account of Whitman... [Doty's] poems are a highly engaging mixture of the quotidian and the numinous.
- Seamus Perry, Times Literary Supplement