It’s been a little while since we’ve heard from Liza, but she’s back with another book review and she promises me she has two or three in the hopper, so we’ll have more to come. She and I both fell in love with the poetry and the prose of Mark Doty when we were at Vermont College. I had the privilege to study with Mark last year at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Liza has a special connection as she has lived in, or around, Provincetown, Massachusettes for much of her life, where Mark has lived and where much of Heaven’s Coast is set. Enjoy!

Heaven’s Coast
by Mark Doty

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what anyone supposed and luckier.     Walt Whitman       

With death, there often comes a wondering about meaning for those who are left behind in its wake. In the opening preface of Mark Doty’s luminous memoir, Heaven’s Coast, he embraces the mysterious immediately. He writes, “The Lakota Sioux say that when nature gives one a burden, one’s also given a gift.” The repetitive experiences of magic that make up this book seem in part to be the journey that encompasses such a gift. 

Against the mystical, coastal backdrop of the natural world in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a town forgotten by time and ordinariness, a town where the less “normal” you are the better you fit in, Mark Doty has used his experiences with the otherwise unexplainable as a passage to and from heaven’s coast, both for himself and his reader, as they pass together in and out of grief.  

With the keen eye of a poet and a deep curiosity about, “the texture and weight of a word,” with sparse language and clear, unsentimental prose, “Writers try to make the world into themselves, and then when they return to the outer life they expect to have changed it,” Doty chronicles the illness and death of his long time partner, Wally Roberts and his assent into heaven from their home on the Massachusetts coast.

Roberts’s death from AIDS in 1994 left an open door for Doty to peer into. Almost as if Doty, in his mind, went to heaven with Wally, only to return after a time to tell us what it’s like. He writes, “In the months after Wally died I felt a kind of spirit with me that sustained me, even though I was miserable; it was strange how I could be in so much pain and feel, at once, somehow close to the heart of life, in a place of no little radiance.”  

Doty handles the meaning and magic of his dreams with brevity, “I dreamed one night that I was wondering how I would survive this, how I’d come through these days, and I saw in front of me a stack of books and papers and pens. The message: You have everything you need,” and then moves quickly back to the story. In a sense this brevity allows the dreams to inform the reader in the same way the writer was initially informed by them. They are there to be considered and to resonate as the ends come in against the middle.    

This portrait of Roberts’s slow and painful death breathes and lives as it dissects the connections we often feel, but can’t otherwise put into words. It taps into something we often avoid because we can’t define it. Into the abyss we go with Doty as he confesses, “To write was to court overwhelming feeling. Not to write was to avoid, but to avoid was to survive. Though writing was a way of surviving, too: experience was unbearable, looked at head on, but not to look was also unbearable. And so I’d write, when I could, recording what approached like someone in a slow moving but unstoppable accident, who must look and look away at once.”

So clear is Doty’s rage, “And partly my rage is at the world, at God, at the blind bone-breaking ugly design of things,” set against the ethereal images of their home and the landscape of the coast that we hold our breath as he writes about a winter afternoon as the two men wait together for death to arrive. “The afternoon’s so quiet and deep it seems almost to ring, like chimes, a cold, struck bell. I sit into the evening, when he closes his eyes.”  There’s the clear ear of the poet again. “A cold, struck bell.” You can almost taste the tarnished metal against your tongue. Doty’s prose is like a poem. To read him is to watch the soul see before your eyes.

He begins the last chapter of the book which is entitled Luckier by saying. “This is the story I’ve been saving.” Saving, I think, because the he knew this was the end of the book before he started. He recounts an experience of walking through the salt marshes at Hatches Harbor on a February afternoon and spontaneously recalling all the lines from Songs of Myself, a poem by Walt Whitman he studied long ago. As a snow storm developed on the western horizon and the sky blackened, the familiar words and lines of the poem came spilling into his head. He writes, “I don’t know where it came from, in my memory, what triggered my recall. The lines, what I could recall of them, felt like company, like the steadying arm of a companion, a voice of certainty.” 

As Doty came to the end of the poem in his mind, he looked up to find himself looking into the face of a coyote. “I thought, it’s a wolf, a timber wolf, and then thought no, there are no wolves here, it’s a dog. But no dog looks like that, or stands alone with that kind of authority and wildness. Then I thought, it’s one in the afternoon on Cape Cod and I’m staring at a Coyote. Then, from nowhere, I thought, He’s been with Wally, he’s come from Wally. I knew it as surely as I knew the lines of the poem.”  That same night a friend of Doty’s dreamt too. She dreamt, “of a coyote wandering the rooms of her house, a powerful and sleek animal that had come to bring her a single word: Safe.”

These are the experiences of magic that Doty’s lays bare for his readers. It’s as if by briefly recounting the dream he’s saying, “Here’s what happened, you decide the impact.” The clear details and words of his experience are his explanation for the unexplainable. The “different, and luckier.” The Native Americans consider the Coyote to be the “Medicine Dog” and that an encounter with one will undoubtedly bring the proper medicine to those in need. I wonder if Doty knew this.

Mark Doty uses pinpoint perfect nouns and verbs to make the unexplainable seem absolutely plausible and magic a non-negotiable necessity. His ability to accurately hone language makes this book less of a piece of writing and more of a work of fine art. Absolutely unforgettable.