Verse chronicle December 1998
Sins & sensibility
On Sweet Machine by Mark Doty, Ten Commandments by J. D. McClatchy, The Bird Catcher by Marie Ponsot, A Working Girl Can’t Win by Deborah Garrison, Babylon in a Jar by Andrew Hudgins, Blizzard of One by Mark Strand & Hay by Paul Muldoon.
Mark Doty’s easy, gaudy style loves whatever the eye happens to light upon; his short lines and shorter stanzas are seduced by the surface of things. There were Renaissance artists who specialized in a particular effect—the drape of fabric, say, or a haunting smile—and, if you want all that glitters, Doty is your man. He has a genius for the rhetoric of light—at first this was method; now it’s compulsion. The poems in Sweet Machine show no restraint in their devotion.[1] Even decay has its gorgeousness:
rotting palaces flung straight
up from the sea, yellow
of mummy wrappings,
coral and rose
moldering now, faded
to precisely these
bruised and mottled
rusts; acid, lichenous
greens:...
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