[In the following review, Smith lauds My Alexandria, stating that the collection contains rich, “buoyant” language and that Doty is an important contemporary poet.]

My Alexandria, Mark Doty's third book of poems, is a rich continuance of the stories of paradise, pageant, and fugitive grace found in the justly praised first two books. His preoccupations have remained the same: the lush world, its architecture and artifice, and the forms of remembering and inventing—what Doty earlier calls “something storied.” In My Alexandria the stories have become raddled with history and language and desire to form a brilliant fabric, a wild spun silk. This “shantung” (one of Doty's spirit words) is his metaphor for pattern and the creation of the poem—the warp of diction, the weft of experience. This deft spinning is the most remarkable feature of his work and the allure of this new book. The great weavers and embroiderers—Scheherazade, Penelope, Ariadne, and Arachne—are his literary mothers. The poems are enchanting, slow and slant, stylish and conscious of style, and shot through with “brilliant bits” and blossom. These poems are interrupted narratives that ravel the lush textures of the world—Keats's poetry of earth—and tragedy—loss and the insults to the body in the era of AIDS. The identifiably gay context of some poems is a thread to find our way in and out of the labyrinth—a sensibility and tactic rather than an exclusionary politic.

“Night Ferry” is an indeterminate love poem/love story, both lyric and narrative, set “between two worlds.” It begins:

          We're launched into the darkness,
half a load of late passengers
          gliding onto the indefinite
                    black surface, a few lights vague
          and shimmering on the island shore.

The shimmering surface becomes “roughened … like the patterns of Italian book-paper, / lustrous and promising.” Doty's poems ride on the consciousness of their own making. He's aware of the mesh of the story; its illusory, watery skin (its “black moire”); and the poem itself as vehicle for what's beyond (love? faith? some comfort?).

          The narrative
          of the ferry begins and ends brilliantly,
and its text is 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—

I like the shifts and turns in the unjustified lines. I like the wit and the risk; consciousness moves idiosyncratically from self, to other, to the “good boat” with its “good smell of grease and kerosene.” In between

          There's no beautiful binding
                    for this story, only the temporary,
          liquid endpapers of the hurried water
shot with random color.

The liquid and buoyant line gives the feeling of being transported and held, of being “between two worlds.” In the shuttling between lines as between shores or loves there is a startling energy here that is restrained in the passage, the process. He's less interested in the outcome than in the “sheen” and “glory” of the journey. In a poem from his first book Doty says: “Not the kingdom itself, where nothing happens / but the approach to the kingdom: / everything, the coming to love.”

The first eight poems in the book are remarkable and “exhilarating” (another of Doty's bywords). There's more world here—city streets, human traffic, nightclubs, and public gardens. And there's more Art here—references to other works of art: Lowell, Wilde, Proust, Hart Crane, Cavafy, and Prendergast. I resisted the referential of the first few poems until I came to “Almost,” a homage to the jazz trumpeter Chet Baker. I'd like to quote the whole solo of the poem, its supple phrasing and gripping attack, but here's part:

you're going to wake up in any one of the
how many ten thousand
locations of trouble and longing
going out of business forever everything must go
wake up and start wanting.
It's so much better when you don't want:
nothing falls then, nothing lost
but sleep and who wanted that
in the pearl this suspended world is, …

These poems are not frotteurs to the famous, accruing value by association, but deeply realized revisions with “all the sheen artifice is capable of.” The art is “that which we know,” in Eliot's phrase, and what enables us to enter these new locations, like languages and genders, is the courage and passion of their lesson. Like the mirror on the cathedral steps in the poem “Heaven,” we are allowed to see the Virgin's golden face reversed. The world is reconstructed by Doty in marvelous ways. And there's an odd harmony between the “wonderful detail” of the city and the artifice (art) that finds its emblems in art's magnificent monuments and in the tawdry—transvestite wigs, sequins, lipsynched songs.

“Chanteuse” and “Lament-Heaven” are Doty at his best—a lavish surface and a troubled depth. I hope that readers, and not just readers of poetry, will add these poems to their private anthology of consciousness at the end of the century.