"Dog Years: A Memoir" by Mark Doty (Harper Perennial, 9780061171017, $13.95)
Most days, Mark Doty wears the hat of a poet, an acclaimed, award-winning
observer of life's bright moments and fragile epiphanies; but in this
memoir, now new to paperback, Doty writes first as a loyal dog-owner and
also as a survivor of some of life's dim betrayals. In describing the vital
importance of animal friendship in "Dog Years," he reveals how language,
grief, and love can be inextricably leashed together with the dear presences
of man's closest companions.
In the mid-1990s, Doty lost his partner Wally to a viral complication of
AIDS; shortly after, he lost his father, too; and still reeling slowly from
those deaths, he relocated to New York City just in time to experience the
physical and emotional blitz of September 11. Through all those shocks,
Doty's anchors were his two rescued retrievers, Arden and Beau--one black,
one golden--who provided vital alternating currents of Zen and Wag to his
life, as well as presenting the undeniable daily needs that "kept me
tethered," he writes, "to the ordinary world of responsibility and
schedules."
Remembering those embattled years, Doty finds wordless poetry in his dogs'
"unmistakable pleasure in living" and in their mute, uncritical witness to
his loss. There's a seaside alchemy in his accounts of beach walks, ferry
rides to the dog run, and beds piled high with warm canine company. He
skirts sentimentality in favor of wry humor and a wise awareness of both the
inevitability of further loss and the undeniable grace of being blessed by a
love and a selfless care that is "all tongue and eyes and golden paws."
This is a moving memoir, a lovely piece of writing, and a dog book for even
those who may not consider themselves dog-lovers. Doty knows that there are
no easy cures for pain, yet he shows us how our four-footed companions stand
as ready and reliable sources of solace, even on our darkest days. "They are
a sort of cure," he writes, "for our great, abiding loneliness. A temporary
cure, but a real one."
Review by
Mark David Bradshaw, April 24, 2008
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