SOURCE: Bergman, David. “Source.” Gay & Lesbian Review 9, no. 3 (May-June 2002): 37-8.

In the following essay, the author declares that Doty is an aesthete with a “very queer turn-of-the-century belief that art and literature are different from other objects and can bring a kind of salvation, or at least a balm to the spirit.”

Mark Doty is one of the few poets who is both central to gay poetry as a movement and an important figure in mainstream poetry. I don't mean to suggest that gay poets aren't part of mainstream poetry, but most of them, like John Ashbery or J. D. McClatchy, have not made the issue of their sexuality an important or explicit topic of their work. Even though Source, his latest volume of poetry, makes fewer references than earlier books to AIDS or lovers or participating in gay community events, his work is still very gay; for...