Mark Doty – “Atlantis”
HarperCollins Books, 1995

Mark Doty seems to paint one fluid stream of pictures in his brilliant collection of poetry, “Atlantis.” He provides a thought provoking, and world questioning escape by truly mastering the art of flow, making his poems run like a stream trickling over tiny stones. Though each poem illuminates a different moment, they all seem to run together in one glorious landscape. The attention to detail Doty pays to the smallest things or moments is brilliant. He notices things most people wouldn’t notice and interprets situations in very unique ways. For example, in “A Letter from the Coast,” Doty witnesses some type of ball gathering in town. The men and women are dressed head to toe in gowns and tuxes. Doty reveals his individual insight on the situation and observes, “…Their secrets/ visible here, public, as so many are,” which is not a typical observation of such a glamorous event. In the first poem, “Faith,” of Doty’s “Atlantis” section, a dream about losing a dog is transformed into his experience with an ill friend. He vulnerably states, “I swear sometimes/ when I put my head to his chest/ I can hear the virus humming/ like a refrigerator.” The chilling image of two Doty with his head lying on a dear friend’s chest, in a calm room evokes a whirl of emotions with a few simple lines. This use of abstract imagery is booming through each and every poem creating a vivid, tangible picture.

In his collection of poetry, “Atlantis,” Mark Doty provides perfect examples of how to defamiliarize words. For instance, in “A Letter from the Coast,” he describes the ball in town as, “another storm/ in town, too, a veritable cyclone/ of gowns and wigs.” He also describes the glamorous women as having, “Veils, seedpearled with the first rain.” His innate talent for shining new light on familiar things causes the cracks between each line to emit luminous new insight. Near the end of the poem, he says to his mystery woman, “A million earrings rinsed in the dawn,/ I wish you were here.” This image resonates like the motherly feeling of a cozy blanket’s embrace.

Doty also has a way of subtly introducing the realizations he comes to throughout this glorious journey of “Atlantis,” with which the reader is allowed to join him. In, “To the Storm God,” he discovers rebirth amidst the unnerving disaster a storm has caused. The moment he discovered this bittersweet renewal, Doty taunts the storm god by saying, “Turn me in any wind, go ahead/ break my house apart./ How else could I learn to read/ the characters scrawling/ this houseboat’s revealed canvas,/ how else would I learn to say them.” The main thing I am learning from his poems is how to take words out of their original context and the typical adjectives used to describe them. This allows for a refreshing thought process and allows me to pull from any word in existence to organically describe the common aspects of our world.