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 boleroshimmering ice blue. Cavafy ends a poemof regret and desire -- he had no other themethan 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 citylit 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 brancheslate in March was white at first,as if a young tree's ghostwere blazing in the woods,a fluttering around the limbslike shredded sleeves. A week later,green fountaining,frothing champaigne;against the dark of evergreen,that skyrocket shimmer. I thinkthis 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.

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.

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

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.