Heaven's Coast: A Memoir - Hardcover

Doty, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 006017210X ISBN 13: 9780060172107

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1996

Synopsis

A poet who won the National Book Critic's Circle Award shares the story of his relationship with lover Wally Roberts, who died of AIDS in 1993, recounting the effect the disease had on their lives and the aftermath of Wally's death. National ad/promo. Tour.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Doty's books of poetry and nonfiction prose have been honored with numerous distinctions, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and, in the United Kingdom, the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2008, he won the National Book Award for Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems. He is a professor at the University of Houston, and he lives in New York City.

From Kirkus 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 Doty). 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, Doty 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. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 006017210X
• ISBN 13: 9780060172107
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320