My Alexandria: POEMS (National Poetry Series)

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.

Mark Doty's My Alexandria is a deeply moving collection that confronts the fragility of life and the beauty found in moments of despair. Each poem masterfully balances lyrical elegance with raw emotion, particularly in the context of the AIDS crisis. Doty's vivid imagery and profound reflections create an unforgettable exploration of love, loss, and the enduring human spirit.

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.

Excellent collection of very fine Mark Doty poems. His poems are always very good but this collection was even better than usual.

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.

Arrived promptly, good condition. Would definitely buy again. The poems themselves were very enthralling, and I would recommend this to any fan.