Rating: 
Summary: Run don't walk to read this..
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Heavenly
Review: I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is greiving over the loss of a loved one.The way that Mark bares his soul over his loss is truly admirable.I love this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Yawn!
Review: I think many are swayed by the emotional impact of AIDS, to the point that they feel that Doty's story is "profound" or "moving," but it's not. He's just some middle-class white guy who has experienced loss. Boo-hoo! For truly stunning writing about AIDS, try Thom Gunn, D A Powell, Paul Monette or Essex Hemphill.
Rating:
Summary: A Primer: How to Love the World
Review: It can't be said enough that this elegaic, celebratory essay is simply style and content of the highest order. Doty's complex world view, founded on the exploration and acceptance of paradox, brings to mind the usual suspects (Rilke, Yeats, Merrill), but at the moment, as I type, I'm reminded of Camus, his Lyrical Essays (of course, he's also the author of The Plague, which has become a sort of "companion volume" to the AIDS epidemic). Both writers intensely engage the worst and the best of life, and write about their engagement with utter clarity and romanticism. Doty's consciousness is truly adequate to the terror and beauty with which he has contended.
Rating:
Summary: Valorous Warrior.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: excellent-very heart felt
Review: Mark Doty captured a spot in my heart with this book. I felt like I was there with him . Once I started I didn't want to put the book down
Rating:
Summary: Finding Life from the Portal of Death
Review: Mark Doty is one of the most sensitive poets and writers we have. His books of poetry continue to garner awards, his memoirs are uniquely important literary pursuits, his meditations on art are becoming the Gold Standard. HEAVEN'S COAST is on one level a penetrating diary of the diagnosis and progression of AIDS as it affects Doty and his lover of 12 years Wally Roberts. Yes, there have been many books written about the devastation of this heinous plague, but few writers have found the path to beauty that such a universe-clanging calamity can bring. No Pollyanna treatise here: Doty couldn't write that way under any outside direction. He writes from his heart, from his experience of having loved so deeply that even death does not separate him from the bliss he has know with Wally. From this elegantly written memoir we learn much about why Doty is able to see the world and its contents in such a special way. He pauses to muse and observe where others would flee in terror. He is able to relate the gradual physical decline of Wally as AIDS slowly but surely consumes his body. He shares his feelings about the medical profession, about friends and family response, about the moments he identifies to incorporate into his soul for food after he is alone. HEAVEN'S COAST is a factual representation of the course of a still unreal viral disease and its impact on the victim and those around the vitim. But because this memoir is written by the brillant poet Doty is, this book is more about life, learning the meaning of life by embracing death, and ultimately connecting with the cosmos. "Ongoingness, vanishing: the world's twin poles. Each thing disappears; everything goes on. The parts pour into nowhere, the whole continues. And to be nowhere is to be in heaven, isn't it, in the boundless, loose from the limits of time and space? Isn't the whole world heaven's coast?" This is a book to read and re-read, to share with those whom you love, to offer to those who find no meaning to existence. In short, this book is a miracle.
Rating:
Summary: Finding Life from the Portal of Death
Review: Mark Doty is one of the most sensitive poets and writers we have. His books of poetry continue to garner awards, his memoirs are uniquely important literary pursuits, his meditations on art are becoming the Gold Standard. HEAVEN'S COAST is on one level a penetrating diary of the diagnosis and progression of AIDS as it affects Doty and his lover of 12 years Wally Roberts. Yes, there have been many books written about the devastation of this heinous plague, but few writers have found the path to beauty that such a universe-clanging calamity can bring. No Pollyanna treatise here: Doty couldn't write that way under any outside direction. He writes from his heart, from his experience of having loved so deeply that even death does not separate him from the bliss he has know with Wally. From this elegantly written memoir we learn much about why Doty is able to see the world and its contents in such a special way. He pauses to muse and observe where others would flee in terror. He is able to relate the gradual physical decline of Wally as AIDS slowly but surely consumes his body. He shares his feelings about the medical profession, about friends and family response, about the moments he identifies to incorporate into his soul for food after he is alone. HEAVEN'S COAST is a factual representation of the course of a still unreal viral disease and its impact on the victim and those around the vitim. But because this memoir is written by the brillant poet Doty is, this book is more about life, learning the meaning of life by embracing death, and ultimately connecting with the cosmos. "Ongoingness, vanishing: the world's twin poles. Each thing disappears; everything goes on. The parts pour into nowhere, the whole continues. And to be nowhere is to be in heaven, isn't it, in the boundless, loose from the limits of time and space? Isn't the whole world heaven's coast?" This is a book to read and re-read, to share with those whom you love, to offer to those who find no meaning to existence. In short, this book is a miracle.
Rating:
Summary: A poetic and poignant journal of life, love, and loss.
Review: Mark Doty takes us on a journey of the heart, the soul, and the very essence of the human condition. His words are full of beauty, depth and passion; he takes us through a realm where so many have been and so few truly wish to understand. Be prepared to be lifted to laughter, and moved to tears.
Rating:
Summary: Stunning; the search for meaning amid the ruins of AIDS
Review: 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.
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