Deep Lane

March 16, 2015
Doty (Sweet Machine), whose Fire to Fire won the 2008 National Book Award, will sate his many admirers with this eighth collection. Having gained renown for his self-consciously beautiful, heart-on-sleeve elegies about the devastations of HIV/AIDS, Doty remains elegiac and continues to attend to beauty. He also does some of his best work yet as a nature poet. Wayward mammals, urban saplings, beaches, forests, and yards (as in the eight poems all titled “Deep Lane”) stand for the omnipresence of mortality, and the persistence of wild desire: a “Little Mammoth,” “milk-tusks not even/ sprouted,” drowns in a prehistoric clay pit; “the striped snake in the garden loves me/ so fiercely she never comes near.” The people in the poems—a needle-drug addict, a survivor of a suicide attempt—make frightening choices, though such choices seem natural to them. We are animals too, says Doty, but we inscribe our choices in language—such as the choice to greet the day, or to look backward on friends and lovers and previous poems. The longest (perhaps the best) work connects a shuttered barbershop on 18th Street in Manhattan to the other losses in Doty’s memory: “I have not forgotten one of you,” he prays, “may I never forget one of you—these layers of men,/ arrayed in the dark in their no-longer breathing ranks.”

March 1, 2015

In the first line of this ruminative and personal new book by Doty, winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, we find the poet on his knees rustically pulling up wild mustard. But the tone dampens down quickly; by line three he's "talking to the anvil of darkness." As he plunges beneath the surface to find "the wild unsayable," the poet soon encounters "the roar// in the blood rising without volition"; a poem on taking drugs finds him "riding all night on Tear Me Apart Road" and experiencing "an astonishing present tense/ blown open seven ways from the hour." But if the mission here is to achieve that rearing, galloping energy, the poetry itself retains the controlled craft for which Doty is known, the sturdy specificity that he identifies in one poem as the soul of a white fish in his garden pond. Hence some uneasy tension in the collection itself. In "The King of Fire Island," identifying with the injured deer he's been feeding, the poet observes, "You must have been weary of that form, / as I grow weary of my head," and, indeed, there is weariness here, too. VERDICT A somber, struggling, honest collection for Doty's many fans.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

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