SOURCE: Smith, Bruce. Review of My Alexandria, by Mark Doty. Boston Review 18, no. 5 (October-November 1993): 33.

In the following review, Smith lauds My Alexandria, stating that the collection contains rich, “buoyant” language and that Doty is an important contemporary poet.

My Alexandria, Mark Doty's third book of poems, is a rich continuance of the stories of paradise, pageant, and fugitive grace found in the justly praised first two books. His preoccupations have remained the same: the lush world, its architecture and artifice, and the forms of remembering and inventing—what Doty earlier calls “something storied.” In My Alexandria the stories have become raddled with history and language and desire to form a brilliant fabric, a wild spun silk. This “shantung” (one of Doty's spirit words) is his metaphor for pattern and the creation of the poem—the warp of diction, the weft of experience. This deft spinning is the most...