The first thing you notice when you start reading Mark Doty's poems is the tone, the rhythm, and what you might call their inflective melody. The tone is recognizably conversational, but what distinguishes it is Doty's uncannily sharp ear for the music of unembellished ordinary speech.

This isn't just a matter of well-crafted lines. It applies as well to each of the poems as a whole. They are structured to give you a sense of when to change the tempo and dynamics.

The result is that, if you come to something you don't quite get, you feel that you don't need to pause but can just go on, that all will be made plain. And that feeling invariably turns out to be correct.

Take the beginning of "To Joan Mitchell," one of the poems in "Theories and Apparitions," the opening section of new poems in this collection:

"At twilight the locusts begin, / waves and waves ... No one's told them the world is ending; / they proceed as always ... you can't call it a cry exactly ..."

		"FIRE TO FIRE: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS" By Mark Doty Harper ($22.95)

You won't have much of a problem with the connection that is soon drawn between the sound of the insects and Mitchell's abstract expressionist "canvas / in four panels ... so charged / as to fill the room in which it hangs / with an inaudible humming."

But you may begin to wonder when, suddenly, a switch is made to "the flash point summer of 2002 ... sun screwing its titanium compress down / on human foreheads in the parking lots ..." (and isn't that a great bit of imagery?).

Then, next thing you know, "a guy in a leather bar ... held my right hand and stared down / into the contradictory fretwork ... translating the lines in my palm, and he said ... Sometimes you just have to make / a little faith."

Just the way those locusts "proceed as always," so "that fountaining canvas ... spoke its green." Art, nature and human encounter turn out to be in the same key after all.

This easy transition from one thing to another that doesn't seem quite to fit but, in the end, proves to fit perfectly is characteristic of Doty's urbane and civilized verse.

There's also his capacity to find inspiration just about anywhere he looks, from a magic mouse being hawked by a street vendor at Sixth Avenue and 14th Street to a 7-year-old kid's self-portrait.

The new poems display a certain serenity and savoir-faire that tend to boost your spirits as you read; even Doty's account of the truck that cuts him off as he tries to cross Eighth Avenue is pretty laid-back in the end.

Which makes some of the selections from his earlier volumes -- the bulk of the book -- especially poignant, since so many of them deal with the terror of AIDS.

"Atlantis," for instance, the title poem of Doty's 1995 collection, which deals with his partner Wally's dying. This poem, with its magical mix of marsh and dogs, dreams and illness and death, gains in heartbreak from its very refusal to surrender to despair.

They get a new dog:

Wally can no longer

feed himself he can lift

his hand, and bring it

to rest on the rough gilt

flanks when they are,

for a moment, still.

I have never seen a touch

so deliberate.

In that deliberateness, that intense and desperate intentionality, Doty discerns and bears witness to a genuine triumph of the spirit:

... so much will

must be summoned,

such attention brought

to the work, this gesture

toward the restless splendor,

the unruly, the golden,

the animal, the new.

If words this moving do not constitute great poetry, I'd like to know what does.