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Home > Dog Years Book Review
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Dog Years -Book Review by Joy Cagil
Dog Years is probably the most wonderful book I have read on the love of canine companionship. Although most of the time the words sound like the author, Mark Doty, is coming to terms with grief over the losses of his first partner, then 9/11, and then his two dogs Beau and Arden, to say this is an after-grief book would be great injustice. To me, the book sounded as literary as Shakespeare, as sensitive as Chopin, and as hopeful as the first day in spring. Hopeful because the writer overcomes everything and anything and accepts life as is.
In the book, Arden is the first and older dog and Beau the second one, a younger dog for Doty and his partner Wally. Arden stays put next to Wally while he ails, and the dog exhibits grief but also acceptance after Wally passes away. Beau is the younger dog, more lively and more boisterous, but this is for the better, because Beau animates Arden, urging Arden to act and feel younger. Of the two dogs, however, Beau is the first one to die. Arden, too, toward the end of the book, passes away. Doty's second partner Paul shares Doty's love of dogs, and Paul, too, forms a strong relationship with the dogs.
After his dogs Beau and Arden have passed away, the author comes across a street dog in San Miguel, and although he wants to take him home after he learns he legally can, he can't find the dog. This is the way he closes that chapter: "Animal presence remain for me, as they have always been, a door toward feeling and understanding. The dog on Calle Canal awakens me; she shows me that I have come through something now. I write to bless her delicate head, the paw raised in hope. How should we know ourselves, except in the clarifying mirror of some other gaze?"
Dog years, despite the subject matter, does not fall into the sappiness most anyone who might undertake to write such a book could do. The emotion is not heavy-handed at all, but the suggestion of it and the bigger philosophical concepts are there. Some passages in the book read like, or rather are, poetry, especially inside the sections in italics, the writer's entr'actes.
The proficiency with language, articulation skills, and the experience with poetic expression of the writer are amazing. At times, the style is simple, straightforward, yet memorable. At other times, it is highly poetic. No wonder, because Doty is a poet and a writer as well as a teacher of creative writing.
Mark Doty, born in 1953 is the author of School of the Arts, Source, Sweet Machine, Atlantis, My Alexandria, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Heaven's Coast, Firebird, Objects and Intimacy (2000), and Dog Years. His writing and poetry have won numerous awards and prizes, one of them Great Britain's T.S. Eliot Prize, the first to be given to a US poet. Mark Doty teaches at the University of Houston, Texas.
Dog Years is 224 pages in hardcover, with ISBN-10: 006117100X andISBN-13: 978-0061171000.
Dog Years is a caring book told with the best possible language tools and probably by the best possible person who can tell such a story. If you are a dog lover and haven't read this book yet, I believe, you are missing something really great.
About the Author
This article has been submitted in affiliation with http://www.PetLovers.Com/ which is a site for Pets.
Joy Cagil's portfolio can be found at http://www.Writing.Com/authors/joycag
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