Dog Years: A Memoir

by Mark Doty

Overview

When Mark Doty decides to adopt a dog as a companion for his dying partner, he brings home Beau, a large, malnourished golden retriever in need of loving care. Joining Arden, the black retriever, to complete their family, Beau bounds back into life. Before long, the two dogs become Doty's intimate companions, and eventually the very life force that keeps him from abandoning all hope during the darkest days.

Dog Years is a poignant, intimate memoir interwoven with profound reflections on our feelings for animals and the lessons they teach us about living, love, and loss.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061171017
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	04/08/2008
Series:	P.S. Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	271,379
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

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.

What People are Saying About This

Ken Munger

“By turns, comic, heartwarming, sentimental (in the very best way) and ultimately heartbreaking.”

John Freeman

“Frankly and beautifully told…DOG YEARS respects Beau’s and Arden’s singularity. Doty describes them lovingly, with poetic specificity.”

Amy Hempel

“Evocative, compassionate, a love story both intimate and grand, this is a beautiful book.”

Pam Houston

“Life-affirming, lyrical, and profoundly affecting…Only Mark Doty could have written a dog book...that covers so much ground.”

Editorial Reviews

Life-affirming, lyrical, and profoundly affecting…Only Mark Doty could have written a dog book...that covers so much ground.

Pam Houston

Frankly and beautifully told…DOG YEARS respects Beau’s and Arden’s singularity. Doty describes them lovingly, with poetic specificity.

John Freeman

By turns, comic, heartwarming, sentimental (in the very best way) and ultimately heartbreaking.

Ken Munger

Evocative, compassionate, a love story both intimate and grand, this is a beautiful book.

Amy Hempel

"A tender reflection on love and loss, this is MARLEY & ME for the cerebral."

People Magazine

"Doty is at his best…exploring the mirrorlike quality of a dog’s gaze or the inextricable duality of hope and despair.."

New York Magazine

A tender reflection on love and loss, this is MARLEY & ME for the cerebral.

People

No human has ever loved his animals as Mark Doty has…Doty possesses a particular brilliance...[A] stirring chronicle of love.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

This is Doty at his best....Doty does in fact make the unsayable sayable, bringing the ungraspable within our reach.

Los Angeles Times

Doty pays loving tribute to two retrievers…DOG YEARS is a warm, thought-provoking discourse.

Entertainment Weekly

Lyrical and sensitive…Doty poetically expresses what many have felt but few can articulate.

USA Today

A meditation on how we can live with hope…Dog Years wrestles with the Big Questions.

Houston Chronicle

Potent and expressive...The weight of Doty’s adoration for his pets is expressed with...eloquence throughout.

San Francisco Chronicle

A great poet can break your heart, sometimes with a single line. Mark Doty proves it twice over….Utterly unforgettable.

Palm Beach Post

DOG YEARS points out what is...magical about life with animals…A...twinkling landscape of the human heart.

BookPage

I was charmed, moved, often fascinated…Doty manages to make inner lives just a little more knowable.

Chicago Sun-Times

Doty is at his best…exploring the mirrorlike quality of a dog’s gaze or the inextricable duality of hope and despair..

New York magazine

Tender and amusing…Doty brilliantly captures the qualities that make dogs endearing.

The New Yorker

Doty writes unsentimentally but affectingly about the solace and companionship dogs provide...the hope...they bring into a home.

Out Magazine

A dazzling, tactile grasp of the world... both arresting and touching.

New York Times Book Review

A wounding yet arresting memoir about living with his dogs…Doty’s gorgeous prose and piercing meditations...are simply sublime.

Washington Post Magazine

In 1994, Mark Doty was standing at the worst sort of crossroads. His longtime lover was slowly dying of AIDS, and Mark was restlessly searching for some way to bring comfort to him in his waning days. The solution came with four paws and a wagging tail. Beau, a large golden retriever, arrived at the house malnourished and equally in need of emotional support. With the help of black lab housemate Arden and his two human companions, this lovably sloppy dog somehow brought peace and his own brand of surrealistic humor to this troubled home. A supremely touching memoir by a National Book Critics Circle Award winner.

Doty brings a mellow, soft-spoken dignity to the narration of his memoir, which chronicles the lives of the distinguished poet and author's beloved retrievers, Arden and Beau. The narrative thread comes together in the form of essays evoking the joy, tenderness, pain and loss in the compressed canine life spans of the two dogs. The four-legged drama takes shape amid the backdrop of Doty's human journey of grief and resiliency, particularly in regard to the loss of his longtime partner to AIDS and his subsequent glide into a new romantic relationship. Given Doty's literary pedigree, it should come as no surprise that he takes a meandering path in the autobiographic story line, pausing frequently to offer philosophical insights. The thoughtful pace and tone of Doty's audio performance brings to mind the spoken-word journals of NPR's This American Life. Audiences eager to cut to the chase for a classic inspirational dog saga may lose patience, but discerning listeners will appreciate Doty's perspective. Simultaneous release with the HarperCollins hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 12). (Apr.)

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Publishers Weekly

Poet Doty (Still Life with Oysters and Lemon) celebrates the 16 lovely years his two beloved 70-pound Labs, Beau and Arden, gave him, but there's an ill wind blowing through the memoir. It concerns the inevitable truth that most dog owners only dimly accept—that they will probably outlive their canine companions. Against a backdrop of devastating human loss, both personal (the death of his partner) and public (9/11), Doty bears witness to the inexorable decline of his beloved retrievers. He well understands the risks he takes in writing about his pets while human calamity unfolds. Even so, he notes, "someone was here, an intelligence and sensibility, a complex of desires and memories, habits and expectations…gone from the world forever." This sad, sad book represents a curious blend of memoir, journal, literary criticism, and prose elegy, and it borrows some structural elements from drama and poetry. Its tone is plangent, its complex formal structure is like memory itself, and its exquisite pace reminds one of nothing so much as a stroll in the park with Fido. Poignant, intelligent, and quite simply superb; highly recommended for most collections, although the Emily Dickinson criticism may make it too literary for the Marley & Mecrowd.
—Robert Eagan

Library Journal

"The fact that I know that stories of faithful dogs are kitsch does not in the least diminish their power," notes poet and memoirist Doty (Still Life with Oyster and Lemon, 2001, etc.), who goes on to write something rather amazing. With the idea of comforting his terminally ill lover, Wally Roberts, the author headed to an animal shelter to adopt a cuddly puppy as a playmate for their black lab, Arden. He ended up with a rambunctious golden lab named Beau, who became a "golden anchor" after the "reverberant, disordering loss" of Wally's death. Arden and Beau saw Doty through his terrible grief: Life went on, walks had to be taken and meals served. Time passed, and the dogs accepted Doty's new lover, first grudgingly and then enthusiastically, with Arden forming a particular bond with the now-familiar Paul. But then both dogs fell ill, Arden with Lyme disease and youthful Beau with a neurological infection that eerily echoed Wally's: difficulty walking, paralysis, followed by death. Arden lived to the ripe age of 16, his elderly presence a constant pleasure for Doty and Paul. A catalogue of the lab's late-life pleasures (the beach, biscuits and "demonstrating, through a nonstop, willful exertion . . . that he can still climb the three flights of stairs to our apartment") round out the tribute. While Doty is clearly fond of animals, his boundless affection is tempered by graceful observations. His warm commemoration of the lives of Beau and Arden makes a fitting companion to his previous chronicles, in prose and poetry, of Wally's illness and death. A profound reflection on hope, and a song of praise for the dead.

Kirkus Reviews