[In the following excerpt, Slavitt faults My Alexandria for incorporating literary criticism into its verse and for its elements of heavy explication.]

The last time I saw Alexandria—wicked Alexandria—its heart was old and gray. It was a sordid ruin of a place, with the glamour and glitter of Lawrence Durrell's lovely quartet utterly gone, replaced by grinding poverty and boring collectivization. Those grand mansions in which mysterious characters had once called “Yassou” to one another and arranged their trysts and hunting parties were now religious schools and orphanages that stared impassively through the unkempt remnants of their shrubbery to a dreary slate-colored sea. And yet, Durrell and, even more, Cavafy, have made the place a metropolis of the imagination, a great center of learning in life's most difficult subjects—acceptance, equanimity, and resignation.

It was a large and bold move for Mark Doty to invoke that city and its poet in his book. Ingratiating, too, I thought, because he manages the gesture without much fuss. A title like “Days of 1981” [in My Alexandria] is an unmistakable reference to certain of Cavafy's pieces (“Days of 1903,” “Days of 1896,” “Days of 1908,” and the like) which were all more or less wistful celebrations of homosexual passion as Doty's poem is, too. But in “Chanteuse,” the poem from which Doty gets his title, he is rather less light handed about it. Indeed, he tells us explicitly:

                                                            Cavafy ends a poem
of regret and desire—he had no other theme
than memory's erotics, his ashen atmosphere—
by going out onto a balcony
to change my thoughts at least
by seeing something of this city I love,
a little movement in the streets,
in the shops. That was all it took
to console him, some token of Alexandria's
anarchic life. How did it go on without him,
the city he'd transformed into feeling?
Hadn't he made it entirely
into himself?

When you put literary criticism into your poems, it's a good idea to make it accurate or at least recognizable. Cavafy did, indeed, have another theme, a more important one, actually, than “memory's erotics.” His assertion of Hellene excellence, the richness and liveliness of that tradition, and its superiority to, say, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and the rest of the modern and supposedly enlightened world is what unites all his work. The Hellenic and Hellenistic notions about homosexual love were more relaxed than those of the later, more or less puritanical monotheisms. With great wit and subtlety, and often in a spirit of playfulness, Cavafy would juxtapose pieces like “Philhellene” (with the splendidly hopeless claim at the end: “So we are not un-Greek, I reckon”) with his accounts of the beautiful gray eyes of the clerk in the jewelry store. It was the daring combination of these two kinds of poems that worked with such authority. What he was calling into question was the very idea of civilization, and his civility was what so impressed Durrell and E. M. Forster and Auden, too. How could they not have been dazzled by the poet's arrogant breeziness that not only refused to apologize for homosexuality but insisted on the provinciality, cruelty, the deplorable barbarity of the contemporary world's—and especially England's—disapproval.

One doesn't have to be gay to be impressed by Cavafy's remarkable poise. One learns from him all kinds of vital lessons in tact, economy, dexterity. And silence. Often, the kick in a Cavafy poem comes not from the words themselves but from the spaces in between—which is one of the reasons that Cavafy translates so well, either in the Keeley/Sherard or the Dalven versions. Cavafy will make a move, and then another one, and where one's breath catches is in the leap between the two.

The aerodynamics of Mark Doty's leaps are nowhere near so spectacular. He spells out for us what we would surely have inferred—and believed and granted—if he hadn't actually said it. “Chanteuse” ends with the following explication of itself:

As she invented herself, memory revises
and restores her, and the moment
she sang. I think we were perfected,
when we became her audience,
and maybe from that moment on
it didn't matter so much exactly
what would become of us.
I would say she was memory,
and we were restored by
the radiance of her illusion,
her consummate attention to detail,
—name the colors—her song: my Alexandria,
my romance, my magnolia,
distilling lamplight, my backlit glory
of the wigshops, my haze
and glow, my torch, my skyrocket,
my city, my false,
my splendid chanteuse.

I have the feeling that I am being beaten about the head and shoulders with the items in this list, or, putting it another and perhaps more accurate way, that the poem is not intended for me at all, or for any ordinary readers of poetry. Doty may consider that he is writing for the slow reading group, which is to say a political faction (the gays, the feminists, the blacks, and the native Americans each have an audience larger than the natural readership for poetry, and the overwhelming temptation for poets of any of those constituencies is … to reach out to them and write for them). If there were some way of getting a sound-track with music that could well up to say how impossibly sad the magnolias and the wigshop and the Boston Public Garden can be in this terrible time of AIDS, Doty might, with reason, have used it. But the gesture in Cavafy's direction, in the direction, that is, of restraint, implication, delicacy, rhetorical leverage, finesse, and tact would not seem to be so much of an embarrassment.

What's distressing is that when he is not invoking Cavafy or Rilke or trying to be so damned explicit, Mr. Doty can produce poems of real accomplishment and commanding quality. My favorite is “The Ware Collection of Glass Flowers and Fruit, Harvard Museum,” which begins:

Strange paradise, complete with worms,
moment of an obsessive will to fix forms;
every apricot or yellow spot's seen so closely
in these blown blooms and fruit, that exactitude
is not quite imitation. Leaf and root,
the sweet flag's flaring bud already,
at the tip, blackened: it's hard to remember
these were ballooned and shaped by breath.