Customer Reviews

Heaven's Coast: A Memoir

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There are many kinds of ears in this world... it will take every kind of voice to make them listen. In Heaven's Coast, Mark Doty's is a poetic, memorable voice. While writers like Paul Monette and Larry Kramer explore the personal as political, Doty seeks and finds spiritual affirmation in nature, thereby placing him among many of his literary predecessors. For critics who take Doty to task for not writing a book that encompasses all those populations affected by AIDS, this is not a political, medical, or moral treatise, but a memoir. It is an account not so much of AIDS but of love, and how HIV/AIDS impacted that love in life and death. As a writer, a widow, a survivor, Doty eloquently articulates his experience of relationship, illness, and grief. Just as the virus respects no boundaries of race, gender, orientation, income, or age, neither does grief. There may be gleaned from any person's history some meaningful wisdom, emotion, comfort, or inspiration. As a caregiver and survivor of friends lost to AIDS, I found that Doty's words gave me renewed vision and new strength.

Loss is one of the most powerful impacts that engraves a permanent mark of misery and grief on hearts of those who had been inflicted with the misfortune of experiencing such tragedy. Losing someone who appears to be the most important part of our life - perhaps, even the reason that we are living - very often causes a dramatic change in our life's perspective and makes us realize things that had never occurred to us before. Losing the love of our life to AIDS adds a great density to the already intense burden of loss. Mark shares with the readers his experience of taking care and loving the one that meant the world to him - to the end of his counted days. His partner and lover of twelve years became infected with an HIV virus, which later transformed into AIDS, and he passed away after four years of suffering and struggling for his life. It is a fascinating, yet a very sad book, filled with lots of happy as well as painful reminiscences.It is very important to have at least that one person you could definitely count on, to feel needed and safe with. From reading the book, it appears that Mark Doty is exactly that extraordinary person with an immense amount of courage and strength. He had never surrendered to the discouraging spirit of AIDS' dreadful abyss that had suffused the entire surroundings for him and his beloved, and that hung over their heads in a dark, dense mantle. His positive attitude helped his partner to gain strength and to keep going through the most difficult time of his life. Doty's use of language is so beautifully fluid, so boundlessly passionate, so real and down-to-earth, that it takes your breath away, and transfers you into his world of thought, into his life, allowing you to enter his most personal feelings and experiences. Doty talks about how he has always associated Wally with seals. The brown eyes, the playfulness, the freedom of spirit, and the undulance of the coastal creatures, to him, were the mirror objects of those in Wally. It is as if Wally lived between the realm of AIDS' unfathomable chasm and the life on Earth, and was unable to articulate the events of one world to the other. The "two worlds" is also presented here as a metaphor, portraying the body of water and Earth as life with a fatality of AIDS and a life of health. Mark was a tremendous help to Wally in escaping the experience of any acute sensations of the borderline between the two worlds that he inhabited. Even though Wally had the knowledge of his fatal illness, he felt loved and needed, and therefore life was worth living to him: "All the last year of Wally's life, he didn't stop wanting" (p. 18). Mark proves his unconditional love for his partner also by tolerating Wally's ironic attempts to flirt with the male nurse. In his virtually unconscious, dead body, Wally still maintained the usual, human longing, and Mark was only happy to see his beloved striving for his life. Mark's superior and extraordinary abilities to write, to express his feelings in the most visual way is what makes this book even more breathtaking.

I have never lost anyone I love, and I fear that loss immensely. I often concoct possible life threatening scenarios for my loved ones, trying desperately (and in vain) to feel the pain I would be feel if they were really to occur, stupidly thinking I can somehow prepare myself for the worst. Mark Doty's partner, Wally, tested positive for HIV, and for four years Doty lived with the knowledge of "the worst": someone he loved dearly would soon to die. His memoir, Heaven's Coast, was another scenario for me to rehearse, this time with the aid of someone who actually endured it...and survived. It was helpful to read how Doty made it through those four years, trying "not to let the present disappear under the grief of those disappearances, and the anticipatory grief of a future disappearance." He strives to constantly live in the present, and his memoir takes the reader in it with him, written beautifully, with a thoughtful, poetic quality it, suitable for such a reflective piece. It is honest, heartbreaking and, for me, encouraging. Obituaries often contain what I call a "survived by" line, something I fear being associated with some day. For me, Heaven's Coast is an annotated, engrossing, and promising "survived by" line.

I loved this book. There are only a handful of writers that are able to write so beautifully, with such solid fluidity. Doty has the ability to create colorful and rich poetic imagery after the sharp edges of loss consume his life.

I consistently recommend this book to the romantics that I meet, the ones who appreciate words that are sculpted from the emotional side of being human.

I do my best to spread the gospel of Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast. These prose crawled inside to a place normally reserved for very few -- a place so tender that only a love like Mark and Wally's could navigate its way and move me to laugh and cry with Mark. It is a great book, not just about AIDS and Wally living with it and dying of it, but of ILLNESS and how we deal with it. Plainly: isn't it a wonder how deeply we can love?

Mark Doty's memoir is utterly moving. The aching need to resolve the many issues created by surviving the death of a loved one bond any reader to Doty. His beautiful language is enough to justify reading, but it is his themes and insight which make this tribute to a lover into an even deeper search for why we live and love at all. His sorrow is heavy like fog, but his stirring examination of self, of relationships and of purpose illuminate. The level of awareness which Doty creates and sustains is both frightening and intoxicating. Reading his book was like becoming one of the seals he watches- diving below the surface, discovering a part of the soul that is universal yet often unfathomable. His ability to take a tangle of fears and questions and put them into such precise prose is astounding. An example: "The virus in its predatory destruction seems to underline the responsibilty of the living; life's an unlikely miracle, an occasion of strangeness and surprize, and isn't it appalling to dismiss it, to discard the gift?" The book is like sledding down a hill- a wild, wind-burnt, painfully exhilarating ride to the core of the spirit.

Doty's memoir shimmers with love, with joy, with pain, with grief. His prose is as rich and lyrical as his poetry. He invites us into his soul as he describes in unsparing detail his lover's journey through HIV. Doty honors his partner with every word; the love and respect is obvious, as well as the despair that results from knowing what is to come and being totally powerless to prevent it.

This book is certainly a tangible gift from Mark to Wally, but the sheer beauty of the writing is a gift to the reader. I draw no sustenance from the ocean, yet I found myself longing to walk across the dunes of Cape Cod-Doty's use of language is that powerful.

Heaven's Coast should be required reading for all healthcare workers.

This book transcends the meaning, in that Mark writes with such vulnerability and intamacy that one feels they are immersed in conversation rather than literature. He writes so that everyone, no matter if the situation is familiar or not, can relate on some level to a sense of joy, togetherness or the chaotic feeling of loss. He describes rather obvious feelings in such a reflective poetic manner. He wrote his book for himself, which as a result is a gift to others. Thank you Mark for putting your life and AIDS on a personal level.

Mark Doty, the award winning poet and teacher, has captured the agony and beauty of life and death in his novel Heaven's Coast. A memoir comprised of journal entries, poems and new text written over the year following the death of his partner of 12 years, Wally, from AIDS, Heaven's Coast is a tribute to love and the human spirit. This is not another "Aids Book," this is not Paul Monette (in all due respect) lamenting on lost love and bathhouses, this is an original feeling portrait of Doty at grips with the universal questions of life we all face-- Doty answers them with grace. His command of the language is truly humbling

I have only one thing to say - this is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read, in every sense of the word. Read it.