Deep Lane

In the first line of this ruminative and personal new book by Doty, winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, we find the poet on his knees rustically pulling up wild mustard. But the tone dampens down quickly; by line three he's "talking to the anvil of darkness." As he plunges beneath the surface to find "the wild unsayable," the poet soon encounters "the roar// in the blood rising without volition"; a poem on taking drugs finds him "riding all night on Tear Me Apart Road" and experiencing "an astonishing present tense/ blown open seven ways from the hour." But if the mission here is to achieve that rearing, galloping energy, the poetry itself retains the controlled craft for which Doty is known, the sturdy specificity that he identifies in one poem as the soul of a white fish in his garden pond. Hence some uneasy tension in the collection itself. In "The King of Fire Island," identifying with the injured deer he's been feeding, the poet observes, "You must have been weary of that form,/ as I grow weary of my head," and, indeed, there is weariness here, too.