The biog printed on the back-jacket flap of this book and in the accompanying press release is proud to name Doty as 'the only American poet to have won the T.S. Eliot Prize' - a British prize, that is, named for an American poet who turned himself into an Englishman. What does this mean? Is Doty somehow the American that 'we' like? One of us? American but not too American? Not as difficultly American, say, as John Ashbery, who we only grudgingly like (and certainly not as difficult as so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, who we prefer not to think about at all), but on the other hand not as corny and therapeutic as Sharon Olds?

School of the Arts confounds this appropriation by showing how easily Doty exceeds his British mainstream contemporaries: how the intelligence, charm, articulacy, seriousness and humour of these poems leave the work of more recent T.S. Eliot Prize-winners, say, looking a little feeble, pale, factitious.

We might compare 'The Hours', for example - in which the process of Michael Cunningham's novel ('a sort of refraction / of Mrs Dalloway') being turned into a film is itself converted into a poem - with the title poem in Hugo Williams' Billy's Rain (another book which won the T.S. Eliot Prize) and a poem touched on previously here by this reviewer, 'Prescience' by John Fuller (who, incidentally, can be found fulsomely endorsing Doty on the back of the UK edition of his earlier My Alexandria). While Fuller swaddles Woolf in soft-focus cliché and Williams does the 'movie-set as simulacrum' trope in clumsy journalese ('…the lights, the videotape equipment / and the man with the rain machine. / "Why can't we use the regular rain?" you asked, / as rain hammered on the roof…' etc.), Doty captures this triangulation of 'shadow and replica, / copy and replay' with an intense fidelity to all of it, arriving at something beyond the 'beautiful versions… no more false than they are true.'

It's a poetics which cherishes the variousness of the world. And this book itself is an object to be cherished, possibly as attractive as a mass-market slimvol can be. The cover shows a pleasing lightness of touch in the matching of the background - blue-green or agua, tending to ultramarine - with the brown-yellow picture of a doggy we discover to be a lurcher (a cross-breed: typically a retriever, collie or sheepdog crossed with a greyhound); this dog, or a version of it, faithfully re-appears throughout the book. Adam Phillips writes somewhere that you can judge a Martin Amis novel by the names of the characters; you can also judge a poet by the names she gives to cats and dogs. Joining the pantheon alongside Christopher Smart and Geoffrey Hill's cats 'Jeoffry' and 'Smut', say, or Thom Gunn and August Kleinzahler's dogs 'Yoko', 'Stoltz' and 'Fella', Doty's 'Arden' seems to your reviewer as good a name as a dog can have, except perhaps for 'Borris'. One of the achievements of this book is to have imagined a language in which companionship, friendship, sociability, love - with people as well as with dogs - can be written about in a tough-minded and truthful way without sentimentality.

Doty also rewrites, disputes American standards. 'The Vault' is a set of poems about varieties of gay sex - 'labour of the mouth… a double embrace… rubber, leather… my submission… The Harness' - which could easily be merely outré, an 'absurd, elaborate universe / of buckles and straps', but is instead a brilliant series of philosophical ventures into 'craving', the limits of body and self, the possibility of not being selfish. And the last poem in the set, 'The Blessing', is also a kind of translation of James Wright's poem 'A Blessing' ('Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom'); Doty insists on grounding Wright's binary and rather desperate wish for transcendence in the corporeal:

…if he remained in his body

(constrained within
the bond of a perimeter
simultaneously fixed and permeable,

if he were stayed, if he held fast -)

then he would break into flower.

A similar move takes place in 'Fire to Fire', with its complications of Robert Frost's 'Nothing gold can stay' and its quick-witted improvements on Frost's grim doggerel ('leaf subsides to leaf. / So Eden sank to grief'):

Maybe nothing gold
can stay separate…

Nothing gold can stand
apart from any other…

Which is why the void can make nothing lasting…

This is an understanding of the world which is essentially religious - the book bears a dedication 'To God'. But just as this dedication is followed by a brilliant couplet from Blake which immediately marks the rigour, clear-sightedness and self-questioning with which this religious understanding will be plied, so School of the Arts does justice to an unbelieving reader through the quality of its verbal textures, and the pleasure to be derived from the accuracy and grace with which they trace the textures of the world.

Mark Doty, School of the Arts, Jonathan Cape, 2005.  £9.00. 978-0-224075-18-3

© Matthew Sperling, 2005

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.