I must begin by stating, for the record, that I am not: a poet, a skilled critic, or an over-achieving pseudo-scholar. With that said, I would like to explain why Mark Doty's poetry means so much to me and hopefully share some of my enthusiasm.

Doty's most recent collection of poetry, Source, was released in 2002 to reviews that continue his critical acclaim. To me, this book functions in similar ways to his other poems that I've fallen in love with: it brings beauty and poignancy to subject matters that already invisibly shimmered with such. I maintain that Doty is not adding Truth, he is uncovering.

While my aim is not to digress into a discussion of the job of a poet and her poetry; what Doty creates seems to be the closest to a satisfactory definition for me. I cannot say definitively what makes a poem "work" and if it can indeed matter in our modern world, but I do know that I feel these poems the more I read them.

Yet even with the first reading, his poetry sticks on my heart. My first example of this was reading Atlantis, his fourth collection of poetry. I was five poems "in," and "A Display of Mackerel" pulled me into the page. The poem describes itself in the title, and paints the gorgeous uniformity, the perfection found in fresh fish on ice: "each a perfect fulfillment/ of heaven's template,/ mackerel essence." The poem wonders if we could exist like this "and lose ourselves entirely in the universe of shimmer." Uniformity and beauty are rarely juxtaposed with sincerity in modern art, but this was a striking idea to me, especially when, contemporous to my first reading of this poem, I was attempting to join a different "rainbowed school" than the one literally described by this poem. From that part on, I was held by poems that I would have never though possible to touch.

I've never seen Atlantis. I've never suffered loss like those experienced around these poems. I've never been to the Providencetown Doty describes but I understand the drag queens caught outside in the summer storm, I sympathize with the lilacs' confused October bloom, I agree that Manhattan is "one splendidly lit idea." I walked away from this collection with an experience unfathomable to me: containing this much life in one hundred something pages of paper.

That experience came rushing back to the fore when I saw the cover photo of Source. A school of fish, deep within navy waters, circling as a whole, as one. My "rainbowed school" wasn't coolly on display in a fish market, it was alive and well in the ocean.

My favorite poem in Source is "Paul's Tattoo," in which the narrator's lover is "written" on in a tattoo parlor. From the first line, "the flesh dreams toward permanence," the poem is opened to universal fear of death, to growing old and going away. "All is vanitas," futile to struggle against mortality, the symbols of our death are all around us. "But resistant, still, skin grows less subject to change" and Paul's tattoo is has taken his skin and "raised it into art, or a wound, or both." It captures life, it agrees with me sarcastically on the idea of tattooing, it finds both beauty and ugliness-- that is also inherently and differently beautiful-- and shares it with the reader.

Fellow American poet, Rita Dove, a poet, a skilled critic and a true intellect, eloquently speaks of Doty's poetry as: "Radiant creations, virtuoso rhapsodies capable of transforming ordinary despair into something dazzling, like a flock of butterflies turning in sunlight." Butterflies, dead fish, lilac blooms, and freshly bleeding tattoos: Mark Doty is the only poet I will ever need.