Customer Reviews

My Alexandria: POEMS (National Poetry Series)

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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.

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 doesn't hammer away at the fact that he is gay; it's just part of the picture, and not even the most important part. I think his worship of beauty comes first, and his ability to see beauty everywhere. At the same time he pays homage to the exuberantly daring and creative gay subculture.

Besides being a master of parataxis, Doty is skillful at interweaving the ordinary and the transcendent. He gives us flowers -- or birches coming into leaf, or the crystal roofs of New York during rain - and he gives us a simple, ordinary narrative (sometimes two or three simple narratives in one poem). The down-to-earth narrative makes the poems amazingly easy to read, simple but far from simplistic.

Doty invokes the transcendent, but also gives up the image of the girl violinist pushing her glasses back whenever she pauses. This prosy detail grounds us in the human, the real, the imperfect. Mortality is of course present everywhere; "Fog," in which Doty's partner is diagnosed positive for AIDS, is a masterpiece of rapture and grief. "I don't believe the lamenting / stops at the borders of this world / or any other," Doty writes. And yet all the poems in this magical volume are love poems to the world. Exquisitely attuned to the moment, this is timeless poetry.

Levine selected My Alexandria for the National Poetry Series a few years ago. And after reading this collection, you can see why it is Doty's best. It's a grim collection, focusing on death and grief, but an elegant one. "Bill's Story" alone is worth the price of the book. This is a book for anyone who loves poetry or has had AIDS tough their life. Good work Mr. 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.

Doty recently visited my college, and after I read his work, I felt truly honored to have met him. He was a wonderful speaker, and very personable.

This shows through his poetry as well. He is a person speaking on real issues, in a very contemporary manner. Not only is AIDS a question of the homosexual culture and lifestyle, but something for the family, circle of friends, and nation to pause and consider.

Yet, Doty does well in keeping the theme of decay and demolishment in check with painfully potent words that make you pause and think. Though, there is hope, and this is not horribly bleak.

There is this vein of American poetry that produces what I'm going to call the Stadium Arena Voice. It's loud and saturating! And when I'm reading it I feel like it's vibrating me in my seat. It's deep and probing and the wisdom is implicit to the tone, so that it feels like the language is this textured old growth forest, and you're inside it, the shadows of the forest, the grain of the individual trees. Poems in this voice give me an overwhelming assurance. And honestly, I can never get enough of it. I wish there would be a Stadium-Arena-Voice Movement! There could be small shrines set up for Robert Pinsky's An Explanation of America and Larry Levis's The Widening Spell of the Leaves and Robert Hass's Human Wishes and Carolyn Forche's The Angel of History. I could name more. Very importantly, there would be a shrine for Mark Doty's My Alexandria.

When Doty is inside this voice, I am given intimate access to the complications surrounding death and mortality. I have not lived through this experience, but I know the voice in these poems is interested in my understanding it; it is capable of holding the experience before me for consideration. Together we'll be devastated and coping and unable to go on, though we have to. This isn't to say that My Alexandria is an emotional pummeling. Maybe I could understand a book of poems like that. But Doty is sensitive to the scope of literature. In fact, I admire how often the book recognizes literature as an intellectual and emotional endeavor, not a reenactment. Can I truly understand what it is like to have a partner diagnosed with H.I.V.? Of course not. But then Doty points out neither can he. And he was the one who lived through it. I look at the transition from "Fog" to "The Ware Collection of Glass Flowers and Fruit, Harvard Museum." "Fog," for me, represents utter tragedy. To follow that with a poem that puzzles over glass sculptures of rotting fruit, calling them "lovely because they seem / to decay," sets art apart. It is merely mimesis. Art can only seem to express this tragedy. And yet, I felt a tragedy inside me when I read the poem. How can art only be something that seems when that feeling for me was very real?

I'm grateful to have the Stadium Arena Voice there as my guide, because the voice is capable of anything. Doty frames different views into his loss. The turtle that hides in its shell in "No." The wave that breaks into the statement You're dying in "Becoming a Meadow." In any frame, that voice is assuring and earnest. I might understand how to live with mortality, if only I listen. This speaker might too--however difficult it may be, he is trying to understand more about his experience. I think that's the touchstone of My Alexandria. This speaker who says, "Maybe, when we read through these poems together, I'll understand what I'm feeling." The poems mark the difference between knowing of devastation and living with it. It is the voice that negotiates between these two perspectives with such assurance. And it's the complexity of the Stadium Arena Voice that allows comfort to reside amidst all the tragedy.

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.

Mark Doty is a national treasure.

Like many poets, he grapples with loss and death, and the continuous effort to find ecstasy and joy despite the "flooding darkness."

His poetry does not flinch from grappling with death. Read "With animals" - brutal and unflinching look at the death of a dog. I won't spoil the poem for you mentioning more details but will say that I was quite enjoying the poem till suddenly the words conspired to deliver a brutal sock to my guts! Also, "Bill's Story" and "Brilliance".

Another interesting poem is "Days of 1981" about a encounter in a Boston bar with a sculptor: a man "slight and dark as Proust, a sultry flirt, (who) introduced himself because he liked my yellow shirt" but who left...leaving the young poet with a token clay heart agonizing over what could have been. Now looking back, the poet realizes he didn't "understand the ethos, the drama of the search, the studied approach to touch as brief and recklessly enjambed as the magic songs"...

Most beautiful lines of that poem:

"Nothing was promised, nothing sustained

or lethal offered. I wish I'd kept the heart.
Even the emblems of our own embarrassment
become acceptable to us, after a while,

evidence of someone we'd once have wished to erase:"

In "Lament-Heaven", a long poem that I had to read (and re-read) in its entirety to understand and enjoy, he writes:

.. "If death's like that,

if we are continuous,
rippling from nothing in being,
then why can't we let ourselves go

into the world's glimmering story?
Who can become lost in a narrative,
if all he can think of is the end?"

and later..

"... Though death's

his single subject,
he insists there is none
or rather that what awaits us is "home,"

something he'll say little about.
What does he mean --
the cloudy parlors of heaven

or the insubstantial stuff of earth:"
Even when not dealing with themes of loss or death, Doty excels: from the interesting imagery in what could be said to be a pedestrian occurrence of a building demolition ("Demolition") to trying to capture the beauty of the glass flowers in the Harvard museum in words to trying to capture the magic of music (Chet Baker, in particular) in words ("Almost Blue") to a cute little poem about a wood turtle ("No") to Human Figures ("a morning of clouds shifting like ripples on silk").

In "Night Ferry" the poet takes us along a journey which every reader has to take himself with the poem and then go back to the beginning and take it again! I cannot do enough justice to the poem by quoting excerpts but here is one:

"...this moving out
into what is soon before us
and behind: the night going forward,

sentence by sentence, as if on faith,
into whatever takes place.
It's strange how we say things take place,
as if occurrence were a location -

the dark between two shores,
for instance, where for a little while
we're on no solid ground."

Leave you with these lovely lines from "Difference", a poem about the beauty of jellyfish versus those of words & metaphors and similes."

".. What can words do

But link what we know
To what we don't,
And so form a shape?

.....

Nothing but style.
What binds
one shape to another

Also sets them apart
- but what's lovelier
than the shapeshifting

transperence of like and as:
clear, undulant words?"

--
P.S. Still not done with the whole book and so have not read Broadway, Chanteuse, Advent Calenders, Esta Noche, Fog, and a few other poems.

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

Mark Doty is a gifted writer, but there is such a mix of profound work and slight image in My Alexandria, that he comes with a little too much hype for someone coming to this book first. There are some exquisite images, but as an AIDS work, this is slim. This work is more about our humanity and how we deal with what we face in the world more than it is about a pandemic.

The most moving poem in this collection is, "With Animals", which is wisely used in the closing third. Some of the work is empty and rich at the same time, which is a lot like a Hostess Cupcake, but we can't live on cupcakes. When Doty really reaches, his work is utterly transforming. Here it is progressive and showcases the talent he shows later in his career.