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.

(Read on …)

Liza Rutherford reads great books and writes great stuff so I’ve asked her to chime in now and again about the books she’s reading and what she thinks is valuable, or not so, so you and I can sort through the maze of what’s out there on the bookshelves these days. Liza lives in Boston, has three grown children and is in the process of applying for an MFA program to further her writing career. We were classmates at the Vermont College Adult Degree Program for two years. We’ll be sharing two weeks next month at the Hambidge Center for the Arts & Sciences in Georgia where I’ll be working on compiling my writings for–well, still to be determined–and she’ll be working on her own memoir with a dramatic historical twist (really cool stuff!). Liza’s one of those people who lives an undaunted life–who cares deeply and gives generously. I love her and know you’ll enjoy what she has to say!

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The Glass Castle
by Jeanette Walls

A wind picked up, rattling the windows, and the candle flames suddenly shifted, dancing along the border between turbulence and order.
- The Glass Castle

I admit to initially being unenthusiastic about reading The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls memoir of her family life, when it was first suggested at my monthly book club. For some reason I’d developed a prejudice toward her and her story. The memory of why is already dim. I tell you this now because, courting my prejudices, I read the book anyway and discovered that I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Jeanette Walls’s surprising memoir is an intimate examination of the relationships within a family, her family, which throughout this book precariously dance on, “the border between turbulence and order.” In this scene-driven wonder, Walls leads us through the stories of her childhood as the daughter of two parents, both of whom find themselves living in poverty on the fringes of society due to their own quirky aspirations, addictions, and ambitions. Alternatingly brilliant and abusive in their child rearing techniques, Rex and Rose Mary Walls justify their neglect of their children using denial exacerbated by alcoholism and undiagnosed mental illness. This is not a book about self pity but instead a book about the far reaches of love and how it can and does exist in a family regardless of its means or its level of sanity. Walls has amazing distance from her strange and sad memories which make this book a pins and needles journey for the reader. We are never told what to feel but instead simply allowed, through Wall’s expert storytelling, to live in her memories and feel them for ourselves. What a gift!