[In the following review, Glover lauds the brash, defiant language in Atlantis, contending that Doty is one of the “finest American poets of the last 20 years.”]

It was one of those rare moments of delight when, in the spring, the American poet Mark Doty won the T S Eliot Prize for the year's best collection with My Alexandria. Arizona-born Doty was unknown to English readers until the middle of last year. Now, with the publication of Atlantis, his second book within 12 months, he is getting the attention he deserves.

Why should we read Doty? Because he is the finest American poet of the last 20 years, the most forceful and inventive versifier to appear in print in America since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977. He published his first book, Turtle, Swan in America in the early 1980s, but it was what happened in his life from 1989 onwards that has shaped the last two books. For it was in 1989 that Doty's partner Wally Roberts was diagnosed HIV positive. He died in January 1994.

Not long ago Doty was asked how the Damoclean Sword of Aids had informed his poetry. “For me,” he replied, “it began to feel like the great intensifier … I was not necessarily writing poems about Aids; but if I was writing a poem about the breakwater or about the colours of the boats at Flyer's Boatyard there was a necessity, an urgency about being able to see; about being able to name experience to try to get it right … to think about what it means to be temporary.”

There could be no better introduction to Atlantis than that statement. The book's working title was Coastal Studies and, in a literal sense, that is what it is about. In 1990 Doty and Roberts moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, a coastal town whose natural and manmade features seem to act as a mirror to Doty's preoccupations with mortality, transience and the beguiling surface glitter of that which disappears all too soon.

Here are poems of the salt marsh, for example, which appear and disappear as the tidal waters shift in and out. Here are the visual rewards of the sea-going life: the wreckage of boats; that green crab shell; the replicated perfections of a display of mackerel lying in parallel rows, each one a display of luminosity.

Doty's poems are minute points of descriptive attention given to a world that seems to have a natural penchant for ornamentation. They are alive with all the brilliant, showy particulars of things. In one heightened and lavish poem, “Couture,” Autumn comes on all tricked-out like some marvellous drag queen: “Autumn's a grand old drag / in torched and tumbled chiffon / striking her weary pose.” Does nature mimic man—or man nature? The poems begin in detail—but they don't end in it. As with Elizabeth Bishop, what matters is what the regarding eye distills from the detail.

Doty's use of language—at certain moments inclined towards preciosity, and at others reminiscent of Lowell's loud, barging, muscular rhetoric—almost represents a frustration with the monochromatic medium of mere words on a page. As he has said: “I am jealous of artists who have tactile, real materials—fibre and paint.”

The book itself is a kind of shout against the diminution of life; a poetry written, like Wilfred Owen's, in extremis, a defiant, extravagant celebration of everything that passes and endures and passes again.