POETRY : Something From Nothing

In his poem “Brilliance,” Mark Doty writes: “In a story I read/A Zen master who’d perfected/his detachment from the things of the world/ remembered, at the moment of dying/a deer he used to feed in the park,/and wondered who might care for it,/and at that instant was reborn/in the stummed flesh of a fawn.”

A book like “My Alexandria” is noted in part because of the current trend in singling out powerful books about AIDS, but also because Doty goes beyond the triumph of the plague to write about life beyond this dark century. In poems such as “Fog,” “Becoming a Meadow,” and “With Animals,” Doty encounters death in life and the terrifying surprise that, as the acute poet, he has the courage to extract beauty out of the living moments created by death.

The entire sequence of poems in “My Alexandria” proves that the poet has no choice. AIDS grips everything around him as he embraces what is spared, what teaches him to see and which visions in natural and urban settings allow him to write and go on. By the time friends and lovers are dead, this poet no longer lives in their world. Like the Zen fawn, he is in the body of a poet rebuilding a country of language where poetry is the only culture spared the disease. “My Alexandria” demands no pity. It is different than Thom Gunn’s “The Man With Night Sweats” and anthologies of poems about AIDS because Doty’s poetry does not insist on the concrete moment of mourning or the wish to change the realities of the late century. “My Alexandria” marks a new way of responding. Doty writes about the suffering around him, yet goes on to create in a totally, perhaps frighteningly clean atmosphere where the pain, the memories and the surviving beauty strengthen and nourish him.

In “Becoming a Meadow,” Doty says “someone comes in and the bell on the shop door rings;/then the words I hear in my head, from nowhere,/are becoming a meadow. Why does that jangling/shopkeeper’s music translate itself to that phrase?” Then, later in the poem, he goes toward the other existence--”And then the whole place, the narrow aisles and stacks,/is one undulant, salt-swollen meadow of water,/one filling and emptying wave, spilling and pulling back,/and everything waves are: dissolving, faster,/only to swell again, like the baskets of bread/and fish in the story, the miracle baskets.”

“My Alexandria” takes the difficult form of elegaic poetry and blends it with a bitter celebration for the energy and stamina it takes to speak to those dying around us, knowing what they leave behind may only serve the poet in his own attempts to recreate the past, perhaps lightly tap the shoulder of the vicious present and plunge, gasping and euphoric, into a future few poets know how to forge with language that often has too short a life amid the countless number of books crying out for our attention.

These poems are rapid travelers in the reformation of contemporary American poetry, in a time when the world wants to challenge the writer with ugliness. The poets who are able to weather this environment, and who are willing to turn the ugliness into something else as the 20th Century turns itself, are the only ones who know the beautiful and infinite voice that appears out of this ugliness. As Doty writes in “Lament-Heaven,” the final poem in the book: “Our guiding spirit,/spelling out his name and intention/through the Ouija’s rainbowed alphabet, isn’t much help. Though death’s/his single subject/he insists there is none,/or rather that what awaits us is ‘home,’ something he’ll say little about.”

POETRY

MY ALEXANDRIA, by Mark Doty (University of Illinois Press)

Nominees

HOTEL INSOMNIA, by Charles Simic (Harcourt Brace)

AFTERWORLD, by Christine Garren (University of Chicago Press)

LEGENDS FROM CAMP, by Lawson Fusao Inada (Coffee House Press)

NEON VERNAULAR, by Yusef Komunyakaa (University Press of New England)