As we pass the one-year anniversary of the death of my lover, gay American writer Paul Monette, it was with great resistance that I agreed to read yet another memoir of yet another AIDS casualty. My defense of selected deafness to the horrors of this planet is still shattered by moments of “fresh grief.”

Mark Doty's lyric recollections in his latest book, Heaven's Coast, on the dying of his lover, Wally Roberts, and on Doty's afterlife will undoubtedly be enshrined with the few other literary master relics of the gay American holocaust. Heaven's Coast is not just about the good nurses and the bad doctors, the ineptitude of family and the altruism of strangers, those quirks we veterans have too often witnessed. Doty has poignantly risked the consequences of introspection: “What my soul requires is this going down into darkness, into the bitterness of salt and chewing at old roots.”

Heaven's Coast is replete with the beauty and ferocity of nature. As a consummate gardener, the poet/author often reflects on the flora: “… the bee-pestered wedding lace of beach plum.” His magnificent depictions of salt marshes and the estuaries of Cape Cod make me want to jump on a plane now. But it's really Doty's love of Provincetown and its community that strikes the queer heart:

Here, at land's end, in the superb setting of this landscape, our gems are the rich possibilities of human love, human pleasures, the splendid diversity and sameness of our longings. It is a place worthy of pilgrimage, where the elements arrange, as they conjoin, small tableaus of miracle and reversal.

Although Doty is distinctly New England in his approach to writing, his queer sensibilities give him an American voice—unafraid to use words like kiva—that distinguish him from your common pompous homosexual New York writing divas. His availability to the holiness of life, his balance of pragmatic skepticism and assured intuition, and his earthly drive to sniff “the scented herbage of my breast,” in Walt Whitman's words, are emblematic of the grace and grit of our true queer spirit.

Of all the good people in this book, I must confess that my favorite characters were the dogs. With my loss of Paul—his celebrated life and its accompanying hoopla—I have endured too many other losses, notably the death of Paul's dog, Puck. In this painfully quiet home, I now refer to my boxer, Buddy, as my significant other. In the aftermath of our quake, I say to Buddy, “We're all we've got left.” During Paul's and my many travels together, whenever we came upon an extraordinary animal, we would refer to it as “a friend of Puck's.” In Heaven's Coast there are many friends of Puck, miracles of fauna whose secrets I shan't reveal. But I must warn the fragile-hearted, any widows clinging to their pets, that everything turns out OK for Doty's dog, who gets hit by a car. For this was the point where my wailing rocked the house.

And in the final analysis, Heaven's Coast, like all great legends, is a love story. But Doty's keen knowledge of love surpasses the confines of passion, surfing equally powerful currents: the primitive butt-hole intimacy of cleaning up your lover's shit, the unparalleled affection of companionate love (“What talk is better than talk in bed?”). I applaud Doty's unashamed honesty in discussing his and Roberts's sexualities. And because of his unapologetic truthfulness, I only wish—perhaps pruriently—that he would have elaborated. We gay men, as sexual as we are, as out of the closet as we are, have so many sexual secrets in our relationships.

Aren't we gay people blessed to have so many kinds of love? Doty writes of falling in love with his lover, after Roberts's death, all over again. In my gentle lunacy I have not dared to attempt to explain to anyone this kinky love I now have for Paul:

Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love.

In both states, the imagination's entirely occupied with one person. The beloved dwells at the heart of the world, and becomes a Rome: the roads of feeling all lead to him, all proceed from him. Everything that touches us seems to relate back to that center; there is no other emotional life, no place outside the universe of feeling centered on its pivotal figure.

And perhaps ultimately, we widows must endure the bitter consolation: “Is the way that time ‘heals’ us simply that it encourages us to turn away?”

Realtors are wont to say, “Location, location, location.”

Heaven's Coast: spectacular views, rustic and romantic charm, queer inspiriting, priceless.