SOURCE: Kennedy, Sarah. Review of Turtle, Swan & Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, by Mark Doty. Shenandoah 50, no. 4 (winter 2000): 130-33.

In the following review, Kennedy offers a positive assessment of Turtle, Swan & Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, a jointly republished volume of Doty's first two poetry books, arguing that the second collection is stronger than the first.

The most recent addition to the University of Illinois Press's series of reprinted first and second books is Turtle, Swan & Bethlehem in Broad Daylight by Mark Doty. With the publication of My Alexandria and Sweet Machine, Doty has established himself as a poet whose work, grounded in the material of current American culture, is leavened by an almost ecstatic spiritual and aesthetic searching. Without sacrificing clarity or narrative control, Doty's poetry interrogates the possibilities of language as a medium to make sense of the complexities of millennial America while its richness forestalls the potential...