[In the following excerpt, Hoey offers praise for Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, stating that Doty manages to create balance between straight narrative and the “stricture of lyric.”]

For Mark Doty, in Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, his second full-length collection, desire even at its most carnal, as in a garden where “every alcove / [was] alive with men until after dawn” and the speaker “didn't know whose hands were whose” (“Paradise”), is the way we struggle toward, as he writes in another poem, “the body's paradise”—an approach to divinity. Doty's subjects include a sixteen-year-old runaway living in a residential hotel in New York City, the clientele and performers at a seedy gay nightclub, the world revealed through books and artifacts, and, in the poem from which the title comes, an exhibition of patchwork quilts. His dominant theme seems to be the longing to grow beyond our solitude and the many forms that longing takes.

The volume is carefully structured in three unnamed sections, beginning with “Harbor Lights,” in which the narrator recalls staying in a hotel at sixteen, longing for a strong mother, represented by the stone face of a woman in a shop window, while waiting for the hallucinogen he purchased at the corner to make “the flowers in the cracked linoleum / … twist and open, scrubbed into blossom.” Other poems, which seem firmly rooted in autobiography but flower outward from that center, delineate the need for a mother, the desire to have a strong physical and emotional relationship with a father, and the hopeless realization that the things we long for most pass quickly, leaving, as he writes in “The Ancient World,”

a form we cannot separate
from the stories about the form,
even if we hardly know them,
even if it no longer signifies, if it only shines.

By the second section, both narrative and form move away from childhood losses and learning to speak a language of emotional need to the ways we seek shape and significance in sexual exchanges. Here, in “Tiara,” an elegy of sorts for a friend we assume has died of AIDS, Doty writes of the man's need to “go down // into the salt tide / of wanting as much as he wanted,” and suggests that “heaven is perfect stasis / poised over the realms of desire.” Nowhere in these poems does Doty distance himself from his subjects; even in a poem like “63rd Street Y,” which specifically concerns the narrator's voyeuristic pleasure in the satisfactions of others he watches through their windows, he finds an empathy with and compassion for those he observes.

Nor, though they veer closely, do the poems degenerate into apologetics. In “Paradise,” quoted above, the narrator checks his reminiscence of bathhouse-variety promiscuity to note:

I don't want to glorify this; the truth is
I wouldn't wish it on anyone,
though it is a blessing,
when all your life you've been told
you're no one, and you find a way
to be what you have been told,
and it's all right.

This poem, like others in the third section, moves to a more consistently elegiac tone. Where the first section elegized childhood, and the second dealt more with the ordinary gains and losses of maturity, the third section confronts more directly the transience of attachments, returning to and varying earlier themes.

Doty's poems have a sure narrative quality, braiding detail and situation in language and lines supple yet firm. His forms are loose, poems usually organized into stanzas of fixed length, with considerable enjambment of both line and stanza. At times the poems become a bit prolix, but he manages to balance between the openness of narrative and the stricture of lyric as well as he handles the balance between the personal and the social, the private and the public, desire and divinity.