SOURCE: Vendler, Helen. “Comic and Elegiac: Two Poets and the Question of Tradition.” New Yorker (April 8, 1996): 101.

In the following essay, critic Vendler reviews Atlantis and a work by August Kleinzahler and finds Doty occasionally capable of evoking empathy despite the inert rhythms in his work.

The names August Kleinzahler and Mark Doty are by now recognized by people who follow contemporary poetry: Farrar, Straus & Giroux has recently published Kleinzahler's fourth collection, “Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow,” and HarperCollins has issued Doty's fourth, Atlantis. Both poets have laid claim to a personal style: Kleinzahler's is astringent, terse, comic; Doty's is elegiac and “beautiful.”

Kleinzahler's poems seem to me far more lively on the page than Doty's. You never know how a Kleinzahler poem may jump-start itself. This one is called “The Year of the Key”:

23.5 seconds for the knurled car-                     bide blade to pass twice, tip to bow and...