Desire can turn into a kind of intimacy within memory’s compression chamber, and few American writers have investigated this transformation like Mark Doty, whose latest collection, “Fire to Fire,” recently claimed the 2008 National Book Award for poetry.
Even the new poems in this volume of selected work feel hauled up from a vast, mysterious deep. Doty is terrifically precise as he inspects time’s wreckage. The right words, these poems assert, have the power to resurrect the past and give it meaning.
Like C.P. Cavafy and James Schuyler, two poets whose work looms large here, Doty is a sensualist with a deceptively casual register. City life provokes his roving eye, providing a steady stream of collisions and encounters.
“On the Number 15 bus on Portrero Hill,/San Francisco,” he writes in “Human Figures,” “a morning of clouds shifting/like ripples on silk, a black man/a few seats in front of me covers his lap/with Chinese newspapers and smooths/the rumpled sheets across his thighs/over and over.”
Doty’s best work makes us highly aware of bodies in space, dignifies what Andrei Codrescu once roughly called the “wind-borne meat comet” with all its gestural mystery, whether it is the figure of a homeless man or the dying body of a lover. “I swear sometimes/when I put my head to his chest/I can hear the virus humming/like a refrigerator,” Doty writes in “Atlantis,” a long poem that manages to write about the specter of AIDS without assuming a reader’s pity.
The author of three tremendous memoirs, one of which, “Heaven’s Coast,” chronicles his lover’s death from AIDS in 1993, Doty is possessed by evanescence. “Fire to Fire” is packed with poems about flowers, seasons, elegies to beloved, late poets, dogs, who live parallel to us on speeded-up time, and tattoos, which mock (or mark) our impermanence with their inky finality. In the urgency of his urban observations, there is a fanatical desire to preserve.
Miraculously, these imperatives never overwhelm the art. The rhythm of Doty’s lines, their syntactical genius, propel us down the page, stop time when necessary, make the familiar — be it advent calendars or lilies — exotic.
Even the grimiest Americana is granted its shaping power here.
“I was in the absolute darkness of Fresno,/ past the middle of my life,” he writes in “To Joan Mitchell,” “As if I’d been colonized/by the long swathes of car lots, flapping pennants/ stunned under the mercury lamps.”
A poet who can work by this light can do anything.
John Freeman is completing a book on the tyranny of e-mail.
Poetry
Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, by Mark Doty, $22.95
