Deep Lane

Mark Doty's poetry has long been celebrated for its risk and candour, an ability to find transcendent beauty even in the mundane and grievous, an unflinching eye that - as Philip Levine says - 'looks away from nothing'. In the poems of Deep Lane the stakes are higher: there is more to lose than ever before, and there is more for us to gain. 'Pure appetite, ' he writes ironically early in the collection, 'I wouldn't know anything about that.' And the following poem answers: Down there the little star-nosed engine of desire at work all night, secretive: in the morninga new line running across the wet grass, near the surface, like a vein.
Don't you wish the road of excess led to the palace of wisdom, wouldn't that be nice? Deep Lane is a book of descents: into the earth beneath the garden, into the dark substrata of a life. But these poems seek repair, finally, through the possibilities that sustain the speaker above ground: gardens and animals; the pleasure of seeing; the world tuned by the word. Time and again, an image of immolation and sacrifice is undercut by the fierce fortitude of nature: nature that is not just a solace but a potent antidote and cure.
Ranging from agony to rapture, from great depths to hard-won heights, these are poems of grace and nobility.