SOURCE: Cramer, Steven. Review of Turtle, Swan, by Mark Doty. Boston Review 13, no. 1 (February 1988): 28-9.

In the following review, Cramer comments on the style and subject matter of Turtle, Swan, asserting that Doty's poetry is “quirky” yet refreshing.

At a time when much American poetry seems paralyzed between two impoverishing forces—“new formalist” campaigns for the sequence of the metronome versus an equally reductive penchant for concocting puzzles keyed to fashions in literary theory—it is enlivening to come across a poet willing to raise the stakes past gamesmanship. In Turtle, Swan, Mark Doty's first book, form is not merely a container but an embodiment of deep feeling and urgently articulated experience. And if his subjects are the familiar ones involving memory, loss, and the artist's necessarily quixotic project to redeem those losses, Doty's quirky, digressive mode of narration still manages to “make it new.”

Doty's poems strive...