The darkly graceful poems in Mark Doty’s seventh collection address the ways we are educated by the implacable powers of time and desire. The world constantly renews itself, and the new brings both possibility and erasure. Given the limits of our own bodies, how are we to live within the inevitability of despair? Art itself instructs us: from Lucian Freud to Virginia Woolf to Caravaggio, all turn the light of human intelligence upon “the night of time.” Formally inventive, warm, at once witty and disconsolate, School of the Arts represents a poet reinventing his own voice at midlife, finding a way through a troubled passage.