Mark Doty Critical Essay | Critical Review by Marianne Boruch

Critical Review by Marianne Boruch

SOURCE: Boruch, Marianne. “Blessed Knock.” American Poetry Review 17, no. 4 (July-August 1988): 39-41.

In the following excerpt, Boruch contends that Doty employs striking imagery and imagination in the poems in Turtle, Swan.

It is exactly this crucial mix, this imagination, that makes Mark Doty's collection, Turtle, Swan, such a stunning arrival. “I am inventing as much as remembering—” Doty writes in “To Cavafy,” a poem half about love, half a treatise on love, a real boy aboard the pond's raft—and a real companion with whom to discuss him—yet, “… desire, how sometimes only an image, / a surface compels us. …” Or in “Gardenias,” a poem springing forth solely from image, a photograph of the speaker's mother, 1939, before his birth, leaning “against a garden gate, her hands in the black dotted / pockets of her dress. …” From this, meditation unfolds the vivid scene, “its dense, florid heat,...
(read more)