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 thesebruised and mottled
rusts; acid, lichenous
greens: vitriolized,encrusted, pearled.
When he mingles disgust and the aesthetic, you think, Ronald Firbank, look out!
Occasionally, Doty makes some gesture toward the depths beneath surface (“art’s a mercuried sheen/ in which we may discern,/ because it is surface,/ clear or vague/ suggestions of our depths”), but his heart’s not really in it—he can’t wait to get back to describing those glamorous surfaces again. The book begins with lusters, sheens, marbled light, lustrous, scarab-gleam, glaze, sun-shot, halos, sunbeams, illumine, burnished, glaze again, gleaming, and that’s only two pages into the first poem: the sunshine comes wholesale. Two poems addressed to recent criticism of his work—poems that may have originated in stray remarks of mine—are highly defensive about this love of the light show. The superficial doesn’t
