SOURCE: Bedient, Calvin. “These AIDS Days.” Parnassus 20, nos. 1-2 (1995): 197-231.

In the following excerpt, Bedient praises Doty's finesse and imagination in My Alexandria, but finds flaws in his tendency toward sentimentality and forced conceit.

Affirmation (ii)

(a) Between Pater and Pantheism. Mark Doty walks on the sunny side of Pater's still impressive, pathos-and-beauty-ridden sense of reality. Where Pater emphasized the elemental forces ceaselessly “parting on their ways,” undoing us, Doty accentuates the ensemble [in My Alexandria]. Life is not a thing of darkness; there are riches for the tasting, the taking, the telling. Consider “the unlikely needlepoint” that wild asters make of an October slope. Life is an obvious good. “It's enough to name the instances.” “Couldn't we live forever / without running out of occasions?” Nothing is a poverty: “Anything lived into long enough / becomes an orchard.” “Even the most circumstantial things / are holy in themselves.” We can...