My Alexandria: Poems

Mark Doty is one of the finest poets writing today. An amazing book you will not regret buying. The poem "With Animals" astounds me every time I read it.

Doty's best volume gives us gorgeous poems that are rich in affection for the self and for everything he encounters - perhaps that's why the book is so charismatic. In our Age of Irony, he sides with ecstasy. In a bleak, minimalist climate, he risks delight and beauty. Once in a while he slips into too much detail, but we must forgive him: the gift he gives the reader is so large. I especially admire the fluent interweave of several different strands in Doty's longer poems. It reminds me that I first encountered it in Rilke's Duino Elegies, and Rilke's influence is unmistakable. To be sure, Doty's angels are drag queens, who represent not just artifice but Art, "the only night we have to stand on." The city - artifice, illusion, the beautiful transvestites - is Doty's poems muse. He's close and nature and animals, but his love for the city, especially New York, is primary in My Alexandria. New York is for him what Paris was for Baudelaire and Alexandria for Cavafy: the city is poetry itself, "my false, my splendid chanteuse." While "Chanteuse" isn't as successful as "Esta Noche," if you skip the preliminary details and start in the middle of page 26, with the drag queen, the poem's captivating music begins to unfold, a magic interweave of narrative and meditation: her smoke burnished, entirely believable voice, the sequins on her silver bolero shimmering ice blue. Cavafy ends a poem of regret and desire -- he had no other theme than memory's erotics, his ashen atmosphere - I'm dazzled by this paratactic leap into Cavafy. And what other poet would dare this transfiguration, when Doty describes the city while it's raining: The rooftops were glowing above us, enormous, crystalline, a second city lit from within. Doty is full of marvelous seductions and surprises. This is the opening of "Lament-Heaven," the last poem that could be stand next to one of Rilke's Duino Elegies. What hazed around the branches late in March was white at first, as if a young tree's ghost were blazing in the woods, a fluttering around the limbs like shredded sleeves. A week later, green fountaining, frothing champaigne; against the dark of evergreen, that skyrocket shimmer. I think this is how our deaths would look, seen from a great distance * I agree that "Bill's Story" alone is worth the price of the book. So is "Brilliance," "No," a fabulous poem about a box turtle, and "Lament Heaven." "Almost Blue," "Esta Noche," "Days of 1981" (the image of the lopsided valentine heart is perfect), "Fog," "The Advent Calendars" come close. But then there are no weak poems in this volume, unless the overlong "Wings" (the Rilkean angel now a little boy with snow shoes flung over his back). In this age of attention deficit, it takes daring to write long poems. In the face of trendy bleakness and the poetics of ugliness, it's a miracle that we have a poet who believes in "an art / mouthed to the shape of how soft things are, / how good, before they disappear." Doty

Contrary to what a previous reviewer said, the poems in this book are not cut-up prose. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, what distinguishes Doty's poems is the music; lyricism is taken to such heights here that just the enumeration of tangent details becomes painful. Two poems in this collection (Fog and Bill's Story) almost made me cry, and the last time I felt so touched was when I read Donald Hall's Without, which he wrote for his dead wife. But I'm not saying the poems here are sentimental. They are not. They are unsentimental to the point of almost straining. It's like he's trying to keep his emotions locked in. I guess what I'm saying is, if you're new to poetry and would like to read easy accessible poems, then maybe Doty is not yet for you. Try Billy Collins. If you've been reading poetry a while and your ear has become sensitive, your mind hankering for something more complex emotionally, then this book is right for you. Five years ago I couldn't read Doty at all; now, after so many years, he's just beautiful.

My Alexandria is undoubtedly one of my favorite volumes of poetry written within the last ten years. Doty's aesthetic reminds me of the aesthetic of the great Japanese woodblock artists -- "mono no aware" -- beauty and sadness. These are poems of haunting emotional resonance and power that are exquisitely rendered in beautifully crafted, ravishingly polished arabesques of language. Doty's sensual imagery is simply stunning, and his sense of metaphor simultaneously organic and epiphanic. The poems "Brilliance" and "Difference," in particular, are poems that I know I will remain in love with always. I highly recommend this beautiful book.

it's an early book of mark doty's but i think it's still his best--great formal range here