SOURCE: Jenkins, Nicholas. “Some of the Museum's Glass Apricots.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4840 (5 January 1996): 22.

In the following review, Jenkins finds shortcomings in My Alexandria, faulting Doty's literary allusions and trite descriptive language.

The successes in My Alexandria stem from an outlook that is frankly Alexandrian; the failures from an outlook that is (for the best of all possible reasons) close to New Age mystico-humanist. As if it were a microcosmic embodiment of a Manichaean universe, neither side of Mark Doty's literary persona can destroy the other.

Doty muses with an appealing straightforwardness on contemporary literary-philosophical topics. In “Night Ferry”, for instance, a meditation on narrative is couched in terms of an account of a short journey by boat: “the night going forward, / sentence by sentence, as if on faith, / into whatever takes place”. In “Difference”, a drifting school of jellyfish, “sheer ectoplasm / recognisable only as the stuff of...