Atlantis: Poems
"I was so filled with longing / --is that what  sound is for?-- / I  seemed to be nowhere at all," Mark Doty rhapsodizes while watching  geese fly in "Migratory," another double vision in his award-winning fourth book,Atlantis. Forming a moving elegy to the poet's lover, Wally, the individual tercets and couplets speak in a cautious but brave rhetoric combining the best of Frost and Bishop. The book removes its mourning clothes and goes downtown, full of rage, to sit in the steam baths of  the edgy "Homo Will Not Inherit," in which the speaker says, "I'll tell you what I'll inherit: the margins." Indeed, Doty's speakers are most  likely found in tidal, watery margins that indulge his double vision of land and sea interweaving like body and spirit. Atlantis begins merely as marshland  uncovered at low tide:Now the tide's begunits clockwork turn, pouring,in the day's hourglasstoward the other side of the world,and our dependable marsh reappears...And our ongoingness,what there'll be of us? Look,love, the lost worldrising from the waters again:our continent, where it always was....This austerity lapses into sentimentality only once, when Wally pets a  dog. Yet even here, Doty delivers an aesthetic message, that the touch  "isn't about grasping / ...so much will / must be summoned, / such attention  brought / to the work--which is all / he is now, this gesture." It is as though Wally's death has released Doty from the uneasy assurances of earlier poems, causing him to rediscover how life exists in metaphor, and at  one remove, the language of poetry. "Description is travel," he writes,  and like Frost in "Birches," he travels along his metaphors, climbing  until they bend and bring him back to a world changed by the  experience.Atlantisand his previous book,My Alexandria, are valuable chronicles of sensibility and intelligence laid bare.-- Edward Skoog