My Alexandria

My Alexandria is one of the essential books of the AIDS epidemic, and it was written inside the catastrophe rather than after it: Mark Doty's partner Wally Roberts tested positive for HIV in 1989, and these poems were made in the interval between the sentence and its execution, when loss was certain and had not yet arrived. That position gives the book its unbearable double vision. The poems keep turning toward beauty, drag performers in sequins, the crystal lit rooftops of the rainy city, white trees foaming into leaf, a lopsided valentine heart, not as escape but as strategy, testing whether attention to the radiant surfaces of the world can make mortality momentarily bearable, and admitting when it cannot. The Alexandria of the title makes the American city of the sick into the doomed luminous city of the poets, a place whose splendor and whose ending are the same fact. Doty's line is generous and unhurried, sentences of real syntactic reach unspooling down the page, a style that holds panic at the pace of thought; the book taught a generation of American poets what elegy could sound like without piety. Publication brought recognition at once: the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in America, and, when Jonathan Cape published it in Britain, the 1995 T.S. Eliot Prize, making Doty the first American to win it. Wally Roberts died in 1994, a loss Doty recorded in the memoir Heaven's Coast and the poems of Atlantis, and My Alexandria stands at the door of all that grief, still open.