Mark Doty, Murano: Glass from the J. Paul Getty Museum ( Los Angeles: Getty Trust Publications, 2000 ) , 56 pages; $14.95 ( cloth ) ; ISBN: 0-89236-598-6 Mary Oliver, The Leaf and the Cloud: A Poem ( Da Capo Press, 2000 ) , 64 pages; $22.00 ( cloth ) ; ISBN: 0306809931
What does it mean that two of our most preeminent contemporary queer poets should both come out with single-poem volumes in the same month in the same year? I can't imagine it's anything more than a marvelous coincidence, but it does seem remarkable that both Mark Doty and Mary Oliver should have done just that.
Another similarity between the two books is that they are both ( or seem to be ) written for someone dear to each of them&emdash;in Doty's case, his friend, the poet Lynda Hull, who died in a car accident a number of years ago, and in Oliver's case, her long-time partner, to whom the book is dedicated. From there, though, one can start counting the differences: Doty's book&emdash;an art book, really&emdash;features photos of glass pieces from the Getty Museum with the lines of his poem superimposed at the edges of the images; Oliver's book is a more standard text-on-white-paper affair.
Doty's poem is broken by nothing more than stanzas, while Oliver's poem is broken into named sections, which are further broken into numbered sections, which are in turn sometimes broken into multiple stanzas. Doty's overt subject is of the manmade world, whereas Oliver's is primarily the natural world. Doty's poem is beautiful, complex, and multilayered; Oliver's poem is often self-conscious and abstract and only occasionally shows flashes of her usual brilliance.
When Oliver is talking about the particulars of the natural world, she is at her best&emdash;"the green pea / climbs the stake / on her sugary muscles" or "Once / in the woods / snake came / like a whip / like a piece of circle / like black water / flowing down the hill." There are moments, too, when Oliver is wholly in the world of humans that shine: "Bless the hips / for they are cunning beyond all other machinery." But much of this long, seven-part poem does not seem up to Oliver's usual standard, wallowing in abstraction ( "I will sing for the veil that never lifts. / I will sing for the veil that begins, once in a lifetime, / maybe, to life. / I will sing for the rent in the veil," and so on ) or getting lost in long catalogs, some of which are decidedly Whitmanesque but many of which lapse into sentimentality and with no clear context for the slender connections apparently being made ( e.g., "first child / speaking its first words / first peach on the tree / first grapes / first hand-holding" ) .
In the end, a poem should exhibit some sense of unity, and "The Leaf and the Cloud" seems to hover somewhere between a love poem and a leave-taking, with its many references to death and long lists of good-byes ( "Think of me / when you see the evening star. / Think of me when you see the wren" ) . Let's hope this is not, in fact, Mary Oliver literally saying good-bye to the world; among other things, I cannot accept that this is the best epitaph she can write for herself.
In what stark contrast, then, Mark Doty's little poem/book Murano stands from The Leaf and the Cloud. The images of the poem are fresh and crisp, the details scrupulous and lush, and he weaves together the two topics of his poem&emdash;Murano glass ( and the city it comes from, Venice ) and his friend Lynda Hull&emdash;almost seamlessly: "Is this / what becomes of art, / the hard-won permanence / outside of time? A struck / match-head of a city, / ungodly lonely / in its patina of fumes / and ash? Gorgeous scrap heap / where no one lives, / or hardly anyone. / Did you have to burn / so harshly bright? / Wasn't the world / ruin enough?"
As for the photographs of the glass, one might suspect that they could be a disruption of or a distraction from the text. But in fact, the effect is to make one read the poem more slowly and to savor it in small, bite-sized pieces. And anyway, taken at very close range and focusing on only an edge or base or handle rather than on a piece as a whole, the photographic images provide something more like a dreamy, surrealistic backdrop than a realistic representation of a specific object.
Of the two books, then, Doty's is clearly the one to buy if you have a limited budget and cannot afford both. Yet Oliver's book, despite the qualms I've expressed, is not without its merits and charms, and both books would make thoughtful presents for someone you cherish, suffused as each of them is with a sense of love and of awe for the world, its creatures, and the things of their making.
