Mark Doty has been delighting readers for many years with his poetry and memoirs. My Alexandria won the National Book Critics Circle Award and Britain's T.S. Eliot Prize (Doty was the first American poet to do so). He won the National Book Award for Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems. Heaven's Coast was his compelling memoir about the loss of his lover and partner, Wally Roberts.
Deep Lane's 35 poems continue to explore subjects Doty cares a great deal about: the natural world, animals, his personal relationships and the "divine." He once wrote that he has been "after a language of the sacred, by which I mean a language of heightened experience." One of the epigraphs in this book, from Ralph Waldo Emerson, refers to the "divine animal that carries us through this world."
Nine of the poems scattered throughout the book are all called "Deep Lane," the road Doty lives near in Amagansett, N.Y. They carefully and lovingly dive deeply into this place. His home and the world he lives in--"Eden" with its "shingled cottage"--provide the inspiration for the poems. Here are ticks ("heat-seeking, tiny, multitudinous"), a pond with its white fish soon to be swallowed by a bird ("bill raised to the air, the throat unrelenting"), his dog, Ned ("You run, darling, you tear up that hill"), maples and walnuts, radishes, the wind ("you can't stay anywhere to love"). The last poem in the sequence, set in November, is about his partner coming home late at night: "with a generous,/ unflinching scrutiny, undeceived, loving, as clear a gaze/ as anyone had ever brought to you."
Two poems examine fellow Long Islanders. "Robert Harms Paints the Surface of Little Fresh Pond" reveals the "rhythms of things/ discerned and ridden." "To Jackson Pollock" begins with Doty's sadness over a "murdered young tree" on New York City's Seventh Avenue, a "broken broomstick discarded." Then comes Pollock, "wild arcs... austere rhythms deep down things, beautiful." It ends with the supplication: "Look down/ into it the smash-up swirl, oil and pigment and tree-shat-/ ter:/ tumult in equilibrium."
One of the longer poems is the impressive "The King of Fire Island," about a buck that lives there, the "very model of his kind." The deer is missing one hoof and wears a "small crown" of ticks "between his two brave ears." He would accept carrots from Doty and his friends, safe, "no cars, no hunting." In late winter Doty hears a rumor about a deer's head floating in the bay: "I saw my own severed head/ slip to the floor, a glazed, paltry thing."
These are gentle, reflective, affecting and observant poems about Doty's past and the present world around him. As he writes in "Hungry Ghost" about his youth: "I would miss nothing,/ wanted to be marked by the passage,/ wanted to be inscribed."
"When I'm gone, will I stop wanting?
Perhaps this is also a form of immortality:
submission to a craving without boundary.
To be ravenous, and lack a mouth."
--Tom Lavoie, former publisher
Shelf Talker: These dazzling, elegant poems from one of the country's most admired and respected poets are ferocious in their love for life.