by Mark Doty
HarperCollins 2008
Reviewed by John Deming
“I am nowhere near the end of my work.”
It’s interesting to consider the netherworld of the “new” poems in a “New and Selected” book of poetry. Usually there aren’t enough “new” poems to constitute a “new” book by itself, but enough of them to render fresh a book of oldies—to simultaneously provide longtime fans a reason to make a buy, and to give new readers the big picture.
Longtime Mark Doty readers who pick up Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems will delight in the first section, “Theories and Apparitions.” Its 23 new poems span 48 pages, enough to constitute a brief collection by itself. In this section, Doty does what Doty does best: fuses self-doubt and darkness with unabashed adoration for the world at large.
Take for example the closing poem, “Theory of Incompletion.” Our poet is “painting the apartment,” and it’s an “elaborate project, / edging doorways and bookcases.” As he works, our poet captures a sudden, unexpected moment of elevation. He listens to something great on “the cable opera station” and is pinched by euphoria: “either it’s the latex fumes or the music itself / but I seem never to have heard anything so radiant.” He is reinvented, however briefly; the poem articulates one of those rare occurrences where everything lines up and yields hope, inspiration:
…And then there’s barely a beat
of a pause before we move on to Haydn,
and I am nowhere near the end of my work.
It isn’t easy for a poet to capture contentment rather than longing, or to capture mood where the only “longing” is for things to continue exactly as they are. The only recent comparable example I can think of is Eireann Lorsung’s poem “Prayer,” which concludes her 2007 debut, music for landing planes by: “let this morning while ice / breaks deep in bay go on / and on let it yes let it…” Both poems are hopeful, but not sentimental, and they are better for it. The speaker in Doty’s poem could keep painting for eternity, as long as that radio keeps playing. And of course, metaphors abound when he is “nowhere near the end” of his “work”—work of writing, work of living. “The wide wings of the present tense,” in the words of B.H. Fairchild.
If nothing else, Fire to Fire represents Doty’s emotional range, intimacy and precision. Somehow, he’s able to adore without being trite; he’s able to elegize without committing himself to despair. Small pleasures are an appropriate counterbalance to the horrors of this world. He is able to focus, for example, on “A Green Crab’s Shell,” which he notes is “Not, exactly, green: / closer to brine.” He is aware that “We cannot / know what his fantastic / legs were like—”, but apparently we can be sure that they were fantastic. By the end, of course, he finds human metaphor in the shell:
What color is
the underside of skin?
Not so bad, to die,if we could be opened
into this—
if the smallest chambersof ourselves,
similarly,
revealed some sky.
There is almost a Mary Oliver-like adoration for nature and nature’s hints about beauty, life, death, etc.—but there is also a sense of mystery, a Charles Simic-like love of small objects and the bounty of meaning they imply. Optimism and dense unknowing cooperate in Doty’s world.
It’s hard to find anyone who has a bad thing to say about Doty’s poems. He can be harsh and modernist, he can be intellectual, he can be pretty. His best poems can devastate. This book will, in all likelihood, win the National Book Award tonight (unless Bidart has his Day), but Doty doesn’t require the distinction. What he does require, for readers, is perhaps a certain mood, something between general sadness and general optimism. For Doty, fleeting epiphanies—moments where we access beauty—tend to make what Simic calls “the impossible human predicament” worth the trouble. If you aren’t in the right headspace, Doty won’t ring your bell.
But this book should be standard for anyone who hasn’t encountered him yet. Those who know him well ought to own it for its generous selection of new poems, but maybe they can wait for what will inevitably be a gorgeous paperback.
*
