This bold, wide-ranging collection — his sixth book of poems — demonstrates the unmistakable lyricism, fierce observation, and force of feeling that have made Mark Doty's poems special to readers on both sides of the Atlantic.
The poems in Source deepen Doty's exploration of the paradox of selfhood. They offer a complex, boldly colored self-portrait; their muscular lines argue fiercely with the fact of limit; they pulse with the drama of perception and the quest to forge meaning.
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November 19, 2001
Doty's sixth book of verse (the first since his memoir Firebird) continues his exploration of gay male desire and post-AIDS mourning amid vividly rendered scenes from Manhattan, Provincetown, rural Vermont and Latin America. Doty (Atlantis; My Alexandria) begins, this time, in the animal world, considering "just one bunny dead/ of mysterious causes." Soon enough, he returns to eros: "At the Gym" evokes "flesh/ which goads with desire,/ and terrifies with frailty." The well-sketched drag queen in "Lost in the Stars" is the latest of many in Doty's work, straining at "the limits of flesh" in her "black glittery leotard." Later poems fan out through history: one longish work, sure to be anthologized, acknowledges "Uncle" Walt Whitman, "our prophet, who enjoins us to follow... the body's liquid meshes" among "the men of the world in the men's house, nude." After a decade of critical and commercial success, Doty's evocations of gay male lovers and their community have lost none of their emotional force, though they may have begun to repeat motifs. His travel poems, on the other hand, can simply rework Elizabeth Bishop, to whom Doty tips his hat in a poem about one of her watercolors. Many readers will keep loving Doty's evocative style, which, as Doty says of his partner Paul's tattoo, is "warmly ironic, lightly shaded, and crowned,/ as if to mean feeling's queen or king of any day." (Dec.) Forecast: Doty won the NBCC Award for
My Alexandria in 1993 and is the only American to have won the U.K. Poetry Book Society's T. S. Eliot Prize (in 1995 for the same title), among other accolades. If the subjects and techniques are familiar, they are no less urgent or resonant: expect brisk sales.
December 1, 2001
Doty's graceful and lucid new poems open the world like the sun unfurls flowers, like X rays pierce flesh, to disclose the wondrous circularity and connectedness of existence. Exquisitely visual, they articulate and glory in the power of light, its warmth and revelation, its ability to coax life out of darkness, and, conversely, its shriveling heat and killing glare. Doty ponders the perfect animal world, creatures with selves so different from our own, or so it seems, and he gleans certain and unexpected wisdom from the sight of a dead rabbit in the grass, a clear plastic bag full of tiny swimming fish, three horses in a field. Doty's perception is fractal; he sees the all in the singular, and his landscapes flicker between the stasis of a painting and the fizzing of life's perpetual motion. A tattoo is an attempt to arrest time; a child's self-portrait is an emblem of joy and our helplessness before it. Witty as well as profound, Doty, without question a major poet, inscribes an ascension in every golden poem.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)
January 1, 2002
Doty's sixth poetry collection offers the picturesque pleasures of a travel diary in subtly formal verse, except that the subjects of his slide show (Manhattan, Provincetown, Key West) are not normally counted among the planet's more exotic locales. But no matter. Doty is keenly alert to the still lifes and epiphanies that may await around the next street corner: "a long argument/ of lilac shadows and whites/ as blue as noon"; a pet-shop parrot's "coloratura tape-loop/ of whistles"; or a church steeple in the midst of restoration, "scraped to nude intensity." Like Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, with whom the poet shares a talent for vivid yet concise description, Doty wears his prosody lightly, using carefully calibrated assonance and alliteration rather than direct rhyme to focus his images in the mind's eye ("this little archipelago's/ flush chromatics require/ sea-light on humid acres/ sun-worried to fecundity"). While several meditative pieces one on Whitman, another on his lover's tattoo seem precious or self-indulgent, by and large Doty's technicolor lyrics call us to the physical world, whose indelible blessings constitute a source of unending inner renewal. Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.