Aids literature needs no aesthetic. Theories about art can come later; and must, if they are to take into account the subgenre of Aids memoirs (some fictionalised) emerging out of the epidemic. To postpone conclusions about Aids and art should not mean suspending judgment, however. Aids literature will not achieve greatness through pity alone.

Naturally, aesthetic judgments feel inappropriate. It is hard to keep in mind the dynamics of prose when a writer—or his lover, in Doty's case—is dying. Objecting to a turn of phrase feels bogus, or surplus; like criticising a man's handwriting as he writes his will. Perhaps this is why critics have said little of importance about Aids art—and why what has been said is often veiled in postmodernist-speak, as in Paul Treichler's coinage, the “epidemic of signification”.

Fortunately a sizeable canon of significant and moving Aids texts now exists. Among their number must be counted Heaven's Coast and This Wild Darkness [by Harold Brodkey]. Mark Doty has already captured the exigencies of nursing Wally through HIV-related infections in two poetry volumes, My Alexandria and Atlantis. Bizarrely Doty's verse has been turned against Heaven's Coast by some reviewers. The book's poised rendering of these events and Doty's grief after Wally's death has been condemned as prosaic if set against the poems, and as aspiring to a lyricism too cogent to render loss properly.

In fact Doty's dexterity impresses, while leaving this reader in no doubt of the abjection behind what he writes. Heaven's Coast gains a compelling, tide-like momentum from its fragmentary structure, too. This highlights its view of grieving as an episodic journey whose pilgrim-like narrator is altered through time. As Doty asks: “What is healing, but a shift in perspective?”

Doty masterfully works new detail, thought and metaphor into a loose-knitted tapestry of loss—whose pattern, nonetheless, is discernible in the repetition of themes. Of these, nature stands pre-eminent: this writer draws a cornucopia of symbolism from a mere shell. The comparison with nature has a literal cogency, as when Doty scatters Wally's ashes on Herring Cove, where he had earlier observed a whale carcass decaying. Waves sweep away the chips of bone among Wally's ashes, just as they had piecemeal devoured the whale.