Deep lane

The poems in this collection move downward, into the soil beneath a garden and the buried layers of one life. Their aim, though, is mending. Mark Doty's speaker steadies himself through the things that keep him rooted in the present: making art, a close bond with animals and cultivated ground, the plain gift of looking carefully, and language as a way of tuning the world.

In one passage, something secretive works all night beneath the earth, driven by a hidden appetite. By morning it has left a fresh track across the wet grass, close to the surface and pulsing like a vein. The image holds the book's concerns: longing that acts unseen, and the marks it leaves in ordinary daylight.

The collection also turns a wry eye on excess, asking whether a reckless pursuit of pleasure might lead somewhere wise, a question posed half in jest. Readers of Doty, an American poet and memoirist known for Dog Years and Heaven's Coast, will recognize the same attention to the physical world and to the self's inner depths.