Mark Doty-s poetry has long been celebrated for its risk and candour, an ability to find transcendent beauty even in the mundane and grievous, an unflinching eye that - as Philip Levine says - -looks away from nothing-. In the poems of Deep Lane the stakes are higher: there is more to lose than ever before, and there is more for us to gain. -Pure appetite,- he writes ironically early in the collection, -I wouldn-t know anything about that.- And the following poem answers:
Down there the little star-nosed engine of desire
at work all night, secretive: in the morning
a new line running across the wet grass, near the surface,
like a vein. Don-t you wish the road of excess
led to the palace of wisdom, wouldn-t that be nice?
Deep Lane is a book of descents: into the earth beneath the garden, into the dark substrata of a life. But these poems seek repair, finally, through the possibilities that sustain the speaker above ground: gardens
