Mark Doty: Capturing Essence in Description
In its colors, seasons, landscapes, and life cycles, nature has an infinite capability to answer and explain human curiosities, and as Aristotle said, “In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.” In Atlantis, Mark Doty uses the power of natural metaphor as a backbone for each poem in the collection. He touches on topics of loss, beauty, life, and courage, addressing each of them with an air of relaxed reflection. A brilliant palette of color, vocabulary, and structure feature boldly in these works, while a tone of casual insight gives the poems a smooth, polished feel. Atlantis is broken chronologically and thematically into five distinct sections each containing between five and seven poems except for the third section which only contains one poem entitled Atlantis. Though the collection is primarily acknowledged as a description of and response to the AIDS induced death of Doty’s lover, Wally Roberts, Doty writes in what has been hailed as the tone of a “privileged observer.” The book maintains a generally detached and ultimately neutral position, neither optimistic nor pessimistic, though heartbreaking at times, and always stunningly vivid.
The first collection begins with Description, a poem which at first describes a dazzling marsh and then essentially answers the question “why write poetry?” As Doty eloquently puts it, “if we say / the marsh, if we forge / terms for it, then isn’t it // contained in us, / a little, / the brightness?” (p.5). He argues that by describing and formulating language for beautiful things, we can possess their beauty and make it our own. The descriptions are also used as a coping mechanism in the face of Wally’s tragic death. The poems are potentially how Doty holds onto his lost love and deals with that loss. This achieves ideally what a first poem should achieve by setting the tone for the collection and stating why the book was written at all. In a reoccurring theme, striking natural beauty is used to answer life’s big questions and initial description leads into a deeper meaning.
The whole first section contains a collection of primarily descriptive poems which include vivid colors, musical language, luminous objects and surfaces, and suggestions of deeper meaning in the seemingly everyday occurrences. In Four Cut Sunflowers, One Upside Down, a standard poem from the first section, Doty’s use of “argent and gold” is typical of the colorful descriptive language he uses as well as his remark that “the world’s / an elaborate dialogue / between citron and Prussian blue,” which includes the subtle auditory images that murmur in the background of his poems (p.7). In a thought provoking end, Doty writes, “[sunflowers] burn / with the ferocity / of dying (which is to say, the luminosity / of what’s living hardest)” and “Evening is overtaking them. / In this light they are voracious,” foreshadowing Wally’s struggle and ultimate demise (p.7).
The section concludes with, Grosse Fuge, a poem which is out of place with the others. It is the longest non-segmented poem in the whole book and even in the table of contents it stands out as the only title in italics. The poem introduces the reader to the main conflict of the whole book in the form of “Bobby,” (presumably short for Roberts) who is dying of AIDS and staying with the narrator during the last months of his life (p.20). The narrator’s pain stems from a fact he acknowledges at the end of the poem, that he feels he “can’t live / in such radical proximity to [Bobby’s] dying” (p.26). In many of the poems, the disease is associated with black and dark colors while Bobby is a blaze of yellow and other warm hues. He wears a “scarlet / parka and a red Jamaican hat… his clothes / in three flowered yellow pillowcases” and his AIDS is directly called “the black angel” (p.21, 23). Throughout various pieces and sections Wally is represented as the life of sunflowers and his disease is the slow creep of dark decay which overtakes them. Like its namesake, Grosse Fuge is a musical masterpiece, full of musical references and a pervasive verbal melody and a rhythm of sounds and seasons. Doty notes the difficulty of comprehending Beethoven’s late quartets saying, “how hard / it is, to apprehend something so large / in scale and yet so minutely detailed” and he projects that feeling of confusion onto his main frustration, losing a loved one (p.22).
The second section revolves around a theme of green colors, coming storms, and destroyed boats that still manage to remain partially intact despite their disrepair. In At the Boatyard, a “drowned boat… / is every day more waterlogged, / less salvageable; it glows, / in the weak sun, apricot,” in the glow of apricot, the wreck echoes Bobby’s warm tones and the wonder that he still remains so long despite his disease and weakened state (p.30). In the Community Garden returns to the sunflowers of the first section only now, some “can barely / hold their heads up… // like lowered shields” (p.38). Doty asks, “how could they stand / apart from themselves / and regret their passing, // when they are a field / of lifting and bowing faces, / faces ringed in flames?” (p.39). Doty’s work was praised in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry as “attentive to the way an individual sense of identity is shaped by collision with the collective,” a theme which is especially strong in the second and final sections. He portrays the individual in context of a larger mobile mass that makes each single piece seem so much less than the whole and Doty reflects on this indirectly earlier when he realizes that “Beethoven / could see the forest and the trees” (p.24).
The central poem, Atlantis, is told in six parts, three dreams, one depiction of light, and two tales of an attachment to an animal. The first part, 1. FAITH, is the narrator’s dream of his and Wally’s dog being killed. “I don’t even want to describe it,” he writes, conveying the horror with such a simple expression (p.49). The dog is “tireless faith” and his envisioned death is symbolic of the ideal and “he is where [they’ll] be hit first” by the disease and the death to come (p.51). They cover denial and anger in part one. The second part, 2. REPRIEVE, is Wally’s dream in which he sees the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, and he describes seeing “a great being standing in the light. // His arms were full of people, men and women,” this comes closer to acceptance than the previous part, but the narrator is unwilling to let it be anything more than “only a dream” (p.53-54). The third part, 3. Michael’s Dream, is the dream of a friend who also lost a loved one. This section centers on the idea of others being “gone” while Wally is still “going,” yet where they go is unknown (p.56). 4. ATLANTIS muses again on the marsh from the first poem and glides over the surface of an answer to where the dead go when they die and proposes a whole continent “rising from the waters again: / … where it always was” (p.58). 5. COSTAL tells of a girl who tries to save a sick loon and whether it is “trust or illness” that prompts it to lay so calm in her arms (p.59). Similarly in 6. NEW DOG “Wally / wants to adopt, / wants something small” so he can build bonds before he dies and so the narrator humors his fancy and brings home a second dog, gold to go with the black one they already had (p.61). In the end the central section acts as a partial consolation to the inevitable death by bringing in something new in the form of the dog.
In the fourth section the poems are decidedly darker and the tone more disconsolate. The natural beauty of earlier sections is abandoned in favor of the menacing mass of urban settings. Two Cities describes a bleak adventure in Manhattan where “steeping ink has covered everything” and the narrator has “grown sick of human works, // sum and expression of failure” (p.67). And in the final section, the narrator returns to his old home among the marshes and oceanic coasts and the decaying boats which slowly disappear. Though in the very last poem, Aubade: Opal and Silver, we find that after the boats which were so much a memento of Wally, what does remain is “the new dog, // the one [his] lover asked for / in the last month of his life / racing unbridled now, abandoning himself / to the arc of his transit” (p.99). Doty also writes, “this fabric’s / spun of such insubstantial stuff // it doesn’t quite conceal the other world. / Can’t we see into it already, a little?” giving the reader possible closure for the questions of where the dead go when they die (p.101).
Work Cited
Doty, Mark. Atlantis: poems. new york: HarperPerennial, 1995. Print.
Jarman, Mark. "Mark Doty : The Poetry Foundation : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.." The Poetry Foundation : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2011. <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/mark-doty>.
The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry Second Edition. New York: Vintage Books, 2003. Print.
