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Book Reviews229 Douglas Goetsch When pubUsher David Godine was asked at a writing conference why aU the poets are getting their memoirs published, his answer came fast: "Because they can write, and they don't need editing." Maybe it's because, as someone once said, good poetry must be at least good prose. The drafts ofpoems must pass the tests of prose on the way to other tests. Here are superb books of prose by the three Ds—for me at least—of contemporary American poetry: Dunn, Dobyns, and Doty. Heaven's Coast: A Memoir, by Mark Doty. HarperCoUins, 1996. 305 pages, paper, $13.00. Mark Doty prefaces his memoir Heaven's Coast, "This book was written in the flux of change," and right away we feel we are in one of his poems: beholding the meadows or schools ofjeUyfish that are themselves tropes for change, the drag-lounge singers with identities as porous, lush, and compUcated as the cities they inhabit. But the subject of this memoir is the illness and death ofWaUy Roberts, Doty's long-time partner, who died ofAIDS in 1994. The other subject, more abstract, is always there but hard to name. Perhaps we can caU it right action, or grace, and how to maintain it in an environment ofemotional, spiritual, and societal "flux," sometimesjust chaos. Particularly engrossing is Doty's discussion of different responses to HIV, and the emotional poUtics of blaming the victim. Jim, who pursues NewAge -type healers, beUeves he has total power over his body and can conquer the virus. Bob, a fatalist who says the world is "completely uncontroUable," is in a wheelchair right away. Neither participates in "the dialogue between what we can influence and what we can do nothing about. . . Neither feels true, finaUy, to the ambiguous, shifting, complex field of human Ufe." It is this complex field, a field that Doty has learned to manage so weU in his poems, that he must somehow manage—at timesjust witness—in his prose, and life. Heaven's Coast also chronicles the death (suicide?) ofpoet and close friend Lynda HuU, and features, near the end, one of the best dog stories you'U ever read. There is also this gem, on the occasion ofWaUy's need for flowered sheets: "Is that why so many gay men have a tradition of redecorating , of knowing how to make anything look good? Since difficult Uves require, in order to make them Uvable, style?"There's Doty's style: questions that intuit so much. 230Fourth Genre Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry, by Stephen Dobyns. St. Martin's Press, 1997. 352 pages, paper, $17.00. In Best Words, Best Order, Stephen Dobyns, in his thoughts on craft and analyses of dozens ofpoems he admires, puts on display a Uterary inteUect as organized as Aristode, as authoritative as Gardner, and as calculated as Poe. Consider the sentence, "We can further define structure as the formal elements oflanguage, texture, pacing and tone imposed upon the informal elements ofaction, emotion, setting and idea."At one point we are asked to map the "four governing aspects" of tone onto the diagram of an atom. Dobyns examines poetry on an atomic level.You and I can't always see the atoms, but his science is as convincing as it is prodigious. In maybe the best ofthe essays, "Writing the Reader's Life," Dobyns gives a smnning discussion ofthe difference between poetry and prose, an exposition involving the subde relationships of the categories of tension, suspense, drama, and surprise—categories that don't normaUy seem so separate. Several ofthe chapters in Best Words, Best Order are studies ofDobyns's favorite writers—Ritsos, Chekhov, Rilke. In the brieffinal chapter, "Cemetery Nights," he puts his own writing up for examination , much as Poe does in "The Phüosophy ofComposition." It's always a bit of a surprise—though it shouldn't be—to find that a poet of such emotional wüdness and adventurous journeys is, when he writes ofcraft, analytical to the core. Though Dobyns does aUow us glimpses ofan emotional selfbehind that enormous brain: "being an artist does damage. It oversensitizes the emotional parts ofone's Ufe, which upsets...

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