Like Cavafy, whose native city the title of this new collection alludes to, Mark Doty is a poet of desire and loss, of the monuments and ruins belonging to ancient and modern, "high" and "popular" cultures alike. The ancient world as underlying our own, and the multilayered mysteries revealed through excavation, imagined or actual, are subjects that have served Doty before.

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From Diann Blakely Shoaf, review of My Alexandria, Harvard Review (Spring 1993).