Source by Mark Doty

Paul Bailey salutes the touching elegies and comedies of a gay poet whose warm-hearted work travels far beyond every label and limit

Mark Doty has been described as a gay poet, but this convenient term does him an injustice, even though his loveliest work, like Thom Gunn's, is involved with the delights and sadnesses of homosexual love. His best poems travel beyond the seeming confines of their subject matter. He risks sentimentality, but so do quite a few geniuses. The word "gay" is an irrelevance when applied to Cavafy, Frank O'Hara and Elizabeth Bishop and, I think, irrelevant in Doty's case too.

At the heart of Source is "Letter to Walt Whitman", a sequence commissioned by Radio 3. It's certainly gay (old and new definitions) in spirit, but ranges wide in feeling and detail. Doty and his lover, Paul, visit Walt's house in Camden, New York State, and Doty observes:

modest, clapboard, dwarfed by the prison
glowering across the street, where trucks
shock themselves percussively on outrageous potholes. Jail, detox, welfare: Camden accepts it all. Camden's the hole in which we throw anything, neighbourhood so
torched
it doesn't even have a restaurant.
You dwelt here, honoured, half confined,
hailed
In your bed as a sage by a country
You helped to misunderstand you.

This is finely said, especially in that last line, for Walt – on all the most reliable biographical evidence – was an accomplished tease. Doty allows himself space to include "Indian kids in the ruins of their inheritance" and thoughts on a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses, "knocking/ With millennial threats and promises":

I was not polite. Our poets fear
The didactic, the sweeping claim: we let the
televangelists and door-to-door
Preachers talk hope and apocalypse
While we tend more private gardens.

It's then that Doty envisages Walt by the beds and graves of "shattered soldier boys", and history and contemporary reality merge. A shorter, even more personal, poem, "Lost in the Stars", reveals Doty at his most tender and funny. It tells of a benefit organised by the erratic Billy, a friend of Doty and his former partner, Wally, whose death from Aids is touchingly recalled in the memoir Heaven's Coast. This is a comic elegy, at the centre of which is a drag queen singing the great song by Kurt Weill that gives it its title. Billy dies, as a gentle, exasperated, afterword informs us. Yes, it's a gay elegy, but death comes, and belongs, to everyone.

My only quibble with Doty is one that I have with some other poets. There's a kind of cultural name-dropping – of painters, composers, and so on – that seems an instant short-cut to significance. Doty isn't entirely free from it. But this is a thoughtful, warm-hearted and unobtrusively clever book. I read it with pleasure, and shall read it again.

Paul Bailey's 'Three Queer Lives' is published by Hamish Hamilton