I just bought Mark Doty's latest collection of poems today, Fire to Fire. So far it's pretty great, most notably for its shimmering depictions of natural phenomena ranging from a bat flying in rural Britain to the ocean shores of Provincetown. Doty's gift for lyrical description is so impressive he'll actually startle me with his language, stringing words together to create beautiful, naturalistic illusions, like some kind of linguistic magician. This talent is also found in his prose works, as evidenced by this passage from his memoir Heaven's Coast:"...On one of the little ponds, this morning, I saw wind riffling the first of the waterlily leaves. They haven't all emerged yet, but new circles tattoo the water, here and there, a coppery red. When the wind lifted their edges, each would reveal a little shadowy spot, a dot of black which seemed to flash on the water, and so across the whole surface of the pond there was what could only be described as the inverse of sparkling; a scintillant blackness. Shining blackly, black but rippling, lyrical: the sheen and radiance of death-in-life."That's some great imagery right there, and yet Doty's memoirs (which also include Dog Years and Firebird), unlike his poetry, consistently fail to back up such lyrical flights with anything really substantial. The result is that, in his prose works, Doty's descriptive gems often feel flowery—pretty and nice and colorful, but not much else. It doesn't help that Doty's style is far from concise. He chooses to write about himself by moving haltingly through his own consciousness, figuring things out as he goes along, and inviting the reader to go on the journey with him. He doesn't trim the fat, but leaves in all the self-doubting, the internal questioning, the dead ends and the trying again a different way. He seems to be trying to write about his life as he is living it, and like life there is no real end in sight, no answers found; the point of Doty's memoirs seems to be the process, and not the end product.This style didn't bother me much in Doty's other memoirs because their subjects were relatively innocuous: Doty's dogs and Doty's dysfunctional upbringing in the dirty south and his early explorations of sexual identity and awareness. I did kind of wonder who this guy was and why I should I care enough about him to read two completely self-centered books about his life, but hey, I thought, he IS a damn good writer and that on its own is usually enough to pull me through something, no matter how masturbatory. But Heaven's Coast is a slightly different story. Here, Doty revisits his late lover Wally's death from AIDS. Here, he write blatantly about his partner's slow, ugly demise at the hands of a vicious, terrifyingly mysterious virus, and then publishes it for profit. And it's okay to do that, but if you're going to hurl the darkest, sickest moments of the alleged love of your life onto a page for all to read and purchase, you better do your damndest to tell their story too, so we can at least TRY to know them like you did (of course we never can, but we want to try, I promise, we do!) I kept expecting there to be a moment in Heaven's Coast where Doty broke poor ol' Wally down, really telling us about him, about who he was, where he came from, and who he might have been. But this never happens. We get wonderfully rich verbal portraits of the peripheral characters in Mark and Wally's life: their late friend Lynda who died in a car accident; Wally's eccentric new-agey brother Jim; another man, Bob, who met a similar fate at the hands of AIDS. These characters pop off the page. Wally, however, does not. We get that he was handsome, that he designed display windows for retailers, that he loved animals. Somehow, though, Doty manages to avoid providing us with any sort of truly telling details about who this man was and why he loved him. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt and think maybe Wally's death was so difficult to take, he just had trouble digging too deeply into his lover's life... but the cynical part of me wonders if Doty just got too wrapped up in writing about himself and how Wally's demise and the whole AIDS epidemic in general has affected him. On and on he goes, wandering the beaches of his hometown, walking his dogs, going to the chiropractor, and ruminating what feels like endlessly on all the aforementioned subjects. There are riveting passages in Heaven's Coast (most of them involving stories about other people; very few of them involving Doty's internalizations), but Doty constantly undermines them with tedious, overlong reflections on the meaning of life and worse, many, many rhetorical questions that come across as just plain sappy. After the very passage I just quoted, for example, Doty follows up the wonderful prose with this:"Is that my work, to point to the world and say, See how darkly it sparkles?"Ugh. And, huh? The book is peppered with such tenderly empty questions, some of them piled one on top of another, unceasing. I suspect Doty is aiming for a conversational vibe, but obviously we can't answer him, and the process begins to become an exercise in futility, as he poses question after question without answers, and no attempts to provide answers.I wouldn't be going on as long as I have been if the subject matter of Heaven's Coast weren't so touchy to me. The book should have been both a lyrical document of living with AIDS in a time when AIDS was new and at its worst, and an elegy to a beloved man in the author's life. In bombarding us with his fears and insecurities (and yes, lovely sadnesses) Doty does paint a powerful and memorable picture of AIDS in the '90s, but in failing to fully tell his lover's life story (or even really trying to), he both sells the person of Wally short and sells his readers short by failing to pin his (Doty's) own emotional struggles on a figure we get to know and thus relate to. In Doty's words Wally is just a cloud of vaguely drawn personality traits and gross sickness (Doty writes with particularly, almost darkly gleeful vividness about the poor man's relentless, uncontrollable diarrhea), not a man for whom we at least get an inkling of understanding of Doty's love for. The result is that Heaven's Coast, for all its 300+ pages of lovely, show-offy linguistic meandering, feels shallow, insubstantial, and sadly, kind of selfish. What Doty has done (I'm sure unintentionally but nonetheless) is aggrandized his own grief and subsequent recovery, then profited off it. I can't help but wonder if Doty, as writers tend to do, saw this book in his head from the moment Wally was diagnosed. If he did, he's sure not telling, and that too (his avoidance of addressing his own decision to write about and subsequently publish this tragedy) is somehow discomforting to me.Naturally, the nature of memoir writing is to be self-centered, but this book is one memoir that should have been the exception that proves the rule. Doty should have written about Wally first, himself second. In showing the effects of AIDS on one, fully realized character, he would have somehow made the story as a whole universal, maybe because we feel like we truly know someone and their plight when we can see something of ourselves in them. We can see ourselves in Doty and understand why he would grieve, but we can't see what has compelled him to share that grief with us.
I read this book last winter, having a fondness for Doty's lyrical poetry and prose, and having thoroughly enjoyed "Dog Years."I can say this is truly one of the most devastatingly sad stories I've ever read, one too close to home for anyone who has ever cared for a terminally ill loved one and watch them slowly fade away. Doty's longtime partner died of AIDS in the 1990s: his story is based on the couple's final years together and is, at times, difficult to read. Nothing is sugar-coated here, and in this memoir, the deceased isn't canonized, but portrayed in a realistic manner. Still, the love is apparent within Doty's gorgeous writing, what a fantastic tribute to a loved one lost. But I would not recommend reading this if you're feeling depressed.
What do You think about Heaven's Coast: A Memoir (1997)?
Mark Doty's memoir, Heaven's Coast, is one of the most poetic books I've read in a long time. Ripe with vivid imagery, Doty's talent as a poet shines through in his prose. In this book, Doty recounts the life and death of his lover Wally who succumbed to AIDS-related illness in the early 1990s. As Doty deals with this, he's also faced with the deaths of friends from AIDS and a very close friend who dies in a car accident. While all this sounds tragic, it's Doty's hopeful message that shines through. Parts of the story literally had me close to tears, but the articulation of hope and peace beyond grief - and survival through it - left me hopeful. As an "AIDS" memoir, this is an important book to read for the younger generations of gays that didn't necessarily have to watch their loved ones struggle and die with this disease. It's important to remember a time when medicine wasn't as good as it is now, and to know what this plague has meant to the gay community. That being said, I think anyone who has ever lost a loved one can relate to the struggle through grief Doty so poetically describes. I can't say enough good things about this book.
—Hendecam
When I first picked up this book, it was to be read during the school day. Due to its poetic nature, and beautiful language, I could not get to a place of concentration where I could enjoy it within the walls of my classroom. I needed a quiet and serene place to enjoy the journey through Mark’s life in Vermont and Provincetown, where his lover, Wally, succumbed peacefully to AIDS. The visit he got from the coyote on the beach reminded me of some of the messages I’ve received from my deceased grandmother. If you’re looking for a way to deal with death, this is a beautiful book to read, but the reader has to have the proper setting and proper mood, otherwise it may have a tendency toward the melancholy.
—Christine Fay
OMG... what can I say about this book? It's phenomenal. I can't say that enough. The emotion is ripe, the story is true, and I bawled my eyes out. It's so sad that bad things happen to good people. But that's life.Mark Doty knows how to write, and write beautifully, even when he's writing about his own life when things weren't so great. This is a very moving memoir and everyone should read it, whether it's their kind of book or not, just so you can get a feeling for what it means to LIVE and what it means to LOVE. Read this book. You won't be disappointed.
—Jordan Lombard
