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

A ledger is a record book of accounts, credits and debits, a book about money. Susan Wheeler’s “Ledger” is a wildly inspired leitmotif of a book about money, trade, the consumer culture and how we account for our lives.

Let blood run out, let the

currency remove.

Other poets have taken money or trade as subject matter ) -- Chaucer, writing of his empty purse; Ezra Pound’s cracked economic theories -- but Wheeler’s poetic mapping of accounts receivable is truly original.

What she does with her multilayered take on the Getting and Spending Society is remarkable. Auden, in his elegy for W.B. Yeats, sends up “the brokers ... roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse” -- Wheeler’s brokers and money changers connect to religion, to pop culture to the romance of capitalism:

The plot in the account books

The sermon in the billboard

The dark night of the statement

Mercy in direct deposit

Her reading of contemporary American consciousness is both sweeping and deft: “They were eager to undertake difficulty and they were eager to repel the consequences.” The book’s tour de force, a long poem called “The Debtor in the Convex Mirror,” is an eerie depiction-meditation-inhabitation of a 1514 painting by Quentin Massys (in which the mirror reflects the outsider, the debtor, the reader, the audience, the viewer): “The mirror lies between two scales -- one banker’s, one maker’s -- and Massys is but writ on its glass.”

Traditionally, we think of poetry as remote from profit and loss -- but here is a lyric poet who is capable of successfully conflating global capitalism, tacky product hype and 17th century religious poetry. Her energy and devotion to detail make her a virtuoso of variety, of vision -- but she also possesses an unparalleled ear for passion and its profound loss.