Sweet Machine is Mark Doty's fifth book of poems, and his first since he published his powerful memoir Heaven's Coast (1996). That book told the story of Doty's relationship with his longtime partner Wally Roberts, who died of AIDS in 1994. Doty's two previous books of poems, My Alexandria (1993) and Atlantis (1995), were dedicated to Wally. In them, Doty chronicled his personal losses to the AIDS epidemic through poems that were brutally direct in their descriptions and gorgeous in their language.

Sweet Machine announces its difference from its predecessors on the dedication page. There is no “for Wally” here, and the book's epigraph, from Hart Crane's poem “Reply,” is not a lament for desire's passing, but an affirmation of desire's power: “Thou canst read nothing except through appetite.”

Doty has said that Sweet Machine “represents a turn toward participation in the world—agreeing, as it were, to be here, to desire, to love, even in the aftermath of loss.” In poems like “Lilacs in NYC,” where the extravagant beauty of spring flowers and the hectic activity of life in the city lead to an erotic tableau, Doty seems to be not just “agreeing” to love, but leaping at the chance.

Though Doty is clearly trying in Sweet Machine to write his grief into the past tense, his losses are nevertheless present. The book's most moving poem for me is “The Embrace,” where Wally appears to Doty in a dream, in good spirits and “almost energetic.” The poem is suffused with tenderness, but not with longing:

So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth
and clarity of you—warm brown tea—we held
each other for the time the dream allowed.
Bless you. You came back, so I could see you
once more, plainly, so I could rest against you
without thinking this happiness lessened anything,
without thinking you were alive again.

Doty has always had a fondness for lush, sumptuous diction. In these lines from “Retrievers in Translation,” for example, his description of a Renaissance tapestry risks sounding like the available shades of sweaters in a J. Crew catalogue:

Coral pupils center that buttery ivory,
parchment deepening to tones of varnish
and ocher, shellac and bronze …

In “Concerning Some Recent Criticism of His Work,” Doty seems to be on the defensive against critics who claim his work is merely decorative:

—Glaze and shimmer,
luster and gleam,
can't he think of anything
but all that sheen?
—No such thing,
the queen said,
as too many sequins.

And in “Dickeyville Grotto,” about a Wisconsin priest who “built around / [his] plain Wisconsin / redbrick church” a fantastical coral and seashell grotto, Doty appears to celebrate art for art's sake, suggesting that “sly sparkle” is far more important than its “purpose”:

… the very stones
gone lacy and beaded,
an airy intricacy
of froth and glimmer.
For God? Country?
Lucky man:
his purpose pales
beside the fizzy,
weightless fact of rock.

Yet in the book's title poem, as he describes a young crack addict on the subway who is itching himself convulsively, Doty seems to become suddenly disgusted with the way poetic language effaces the boy's pitiful reality: “Moth, plum—hear how the imagery aestheticizes?” In “Metro North,” we find a similar resistance to the practice of reducing the real world to a set of metaphors. Doty notices a homeless man's crude shelter from a train window each morning on his way to work. Over time, as the poet observes more and more details of the man's dwelling—a dog, a set of white plates—he is less and less able to make a symbol of him:

He had a ruined car,
and heaps of clothes,
and things to read,
was no emblem,
in other words,
but a citizen …

Like so many others who lost loved ones during the height of the AIDS epidemic, Doty is now beginning to imagine a life (and a poetry) no longer defined by AIDS. “Somebody's going to live through this,” he writes, “Suppose it's you?” Even as he is reconsidering what poems he will write in this new world, Doty also reconsiders the style in which he will write in this new world, Doty also reconsiders the style in which he will write them. Throughout this collection, Doty both celebrates and questions his aesthetic, as if he is trying out different positions to see which fit him best.

In Sweet Machine, we see an already masterful poet refusing to lapse into nostalgia or to unthinkingly reuse the poetic strategies that have served him so well in the past. Instead, we find Mark Doty exploring new territories and questioning himself at every turn.