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.
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From #1 New York Times bestselling author Colleen Hoover comes a novel that explores life after tragedy and the enduring spirit of love. | Learn more
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