Poets' Corner

School of the Arts

Mark Doty

HarperCollins: 112 pp., $22.95

Mark DOTY's seventh book of poems, "School of the Arts," marks a major change in a proven poetic style. Doty is one of America's most popular poets -- his lyrical, passionate voice, his protean shifts from a James Merrill-esque rhetorical gesture to an Elizabeth Bishop-like exactitude in his inventive poems are near legendary.

In "School of the Arts," he embarks on a new style: lean, uncontrived, direct and emphatic. This is a book of (as Keats would have it) "soul-making," and the soul being made here is at school in art itself, learning about heaven and Earth through the bright, unsparing lens of the aesthetic, but also through an apprehension of the relentless "real":

... won't our paradise also

involve

participation in being, say,

diesel fuel, the impatience of

trucks

on August pavement ...

In a poem centered on the German-born British painter Lucian Freud, he notes: " ... materiality, intersection / of solidity and flame, / where quick and stillness meet -- " and "Nobody is representing anything."

The poems turn on a notion of representation that enlarges with understanding and grief. Everything and everyone is a "portrait" in this collection, but nothing is "posed" or arranged for regard. In one of the most affecting poems in the volume, "Heaven for Paul," a close call with death precipitates this insight: " ... if God intervenes / in history, his intent's either to torment us / or to make us laugh, or both.... "

What is being taught in "School of the Arts" is the shape of consciousness itself -- it is not just apperception but how time and desire alter perception. Doty's music is compelling -- each voice given here speaks directly to the reader: "When I say I hate time, Paul says / how else could we find depth / of character, or grow souls." This is not only Keatsian, it is the only answer to despair in a world dying and renewing itself endlessly.

"School of the Arts" seems to me Doty's best book -- and the wisest. There is so much here to educate us, to lead the reader to both trepidation and consolation. The vulnerable old, the animals, the suffering and the gifted and lost -- all of us and our selves as represented in art -- are considered here with enormous empathy and Wordsworthian glory.

*

Ledger

Susan Wheeler

Iowa University Press: 84 pp., $14