Overview

HEAVEN'S COAST is an anatomy of loss- tender, heartbreaking, consoling and, ultimately, incredibly moving. Beginning with the first onset of AIDS and its lengthening shadow over a blissful relationship, the book follows the shifting patterns between two loves as the illness takes hold - the change in them and the change in the way they perceive the world, through the lens of grief. Doty examines the nature of AIDS as opposed to other illnesses, the responses of society, the frustration of medical care and the exhausting - and occasionally uplifting - burden of caring for the dying at home.

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9780099731610

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Reviews

Asking, What does a writer do, when the world collapses, but write?, Doty, whose world collapsed when his lover died, gives an answer that's both generous and indulgent. In a look back at the period before, during, and after Wally Roberts succumbed to complications of AIDS, the author (a winner of the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry) walks a path between the practical and the poetic, the enraged and the calm. On one hand, he's got helpful observations for support partners - The lower one goes in the medical system, it seems, the more humanity, the more hands-on help, the more genuine care. On the other, he's ready to turn profound on death's many approaching moments, especially its final one - . . . he is most himself, even if that self empties out into no one, swift river hurrying into the tumble of rivers, out of individuality, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents. Putting the puzzle of his life back together after Roberts's demise upset it, Doty returns to the Boston house where the proud and very out pair first lived together (but in separate apartments); recalls the Vermont homes they shared; and fills in the final Provincetown years. He visits landscapes here and abroad, finding reminders - and metaphors and avatars - of their relationship wherever he looks. He also writes with love about the friends who filled the couple's days with joy and anxiety (a self-destructive poet identified only as Lynda particularly delights and infuriates Dory). He commemorates Arden and Beau, two rollicking dogs who kept things much happier than they might otherwise have been. A poet with a quick memory for poems he didn't write, Dory is angry at the realities of the world when it unleashes physical and moral diseases, and grateful when it shows a kinder face. A book very much like grief itself in that it's sometimes awkward, often uncontrolled, and always deeply felt. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Mark Doty is the author of more than ten volumes of poetry and three memoirs. His many honours include the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and, in the UK, the T. S. Eliot Prize. He is a professor at Rutgers University and lives in New York City.

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