SOURCE: Review of Sweet Machine, by Mark Doty. Virginia Quarterly Review 75, no. 1 (winter 1999): 31.

In the following review, the critic examines the recurring themes in Sweet Machine, noting that the collection shows a definite focus on such issues as redemption and joy.

In this collection, Doty returns to themes familiar to his readers—art, the physical world, city life—even as these poems extend his formal range. Many of the narrative lyrics which comprise Sweet Machine span several pages—unusual for such a self-contained, compressed form as the contemporary lyric poem—and one wonders if the ferocious intensity and elegiac tone of these poems can be sustained, if they won't break apart from the internal pressure created by their own lavish, often startling imagery. They rarely do. While Doty has consciously chosen to make the question a familiar gesture in his poetry (which occasionally has the effect of its...