SOURCE: Glover, Michael. “Sea Changes.” New Statesman 125, no. 4294 (26 July 1996): 47.

In the following review, Glover lauds the brash, defiant language in Atlantis, contending that Doty is one of the “finest American poets of the last 20 years.”

It was one of those rare moments of delight when, in the spring, the American poet Mark Doty won the T S Eliot Prize for the year's best collection with My Alexandria. Arizona-born Doty was unknown to English readers until the middle of last year. Now, with the publication of Atlantis, his second book within 12 months, he is getting the attention he deserves.

Why should we read Doty? Because he is the finest American poet of the last 20 years, the most forceful and inventive versifier to appear in print in America since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977. He published his first book, Turtle, Swan in America in the early 1980s, but it...