SOURCE: Welton, Mathew. “Creating Things.” PN Review 25, no. 3 (January-February 1999): 68.

In the following essay, the author praises Sweet Machine even though he finds Doty's graceful and effective lines occasionally dragged down by overly forceful language.

What Mark Doty does best in his new collection is the same thing he does best in his previous books; simple descriptions, the ways he represents things perceived, are brief and direct, bringing the poems immediately to life. For example, in ‘White Kimono’ a shipment of old robes is ‘thunderheads / of pine mounting a stony slope / tousled fields of embroidery’; ‘costumes for some Japanese // midsummer's eve’; ‘tiny gossamer sleeves / like mothwings worrying a midnight lamp’, Descriptions of such style and quality typify Doty's work. Where for other writers this surface-buzz, these needle-pricks of sensation, might represent the limit of their talent, Doty's work is awash with language of this kind. Poems such as ‘Thirty...