Product Description

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

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22822 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-01
• Released on: 2008-04-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Award-winning memoirist (Firebird) and poet (School of the Arts) Doty explores, with compassion and intelligence, the complicated, loving territory inhabited by devoted dogs and their loyal humans. In 1994, when the author's longtime lover was dying of AIDS, beloved pet Arden kept the surviving partner afloat. A new adoptee, the rambunctious Beau, in his "sloppy dog way," becomes a part of the tribe and carries some of the burden of grief. Doty says Beau "carried something else for me too, which was my will to live." In a time of devastating pain, as well as in happier times, Doty's two dogs are the "secret heroes of my own vitality." The dog characters in the book are irresistible, and the arcs of their lives are delineated with the tenderness and passion of the truly smitten. Arden's quiet nobility and slow decline breaks the heart, while Beau's goofy enthusiasm peaks with youth and mellows in illness. With a marvelous ability to present the pain of mourning with a poet's delicate hand, and an irrepressible instinct for joy, Doty delivers a soulful love story which illuminates no less than the big human mysteries: attachment, death, grief, loyalty, happiness. The book nimbly sidesteps sentimentality and lands squarely on a philosophical, inquisitive tone as intellectually evocative as it is emotionally resonant. (Mar.)
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From Booklist
To be loved by Doty, as a human or a canine, is to be elevated into a realm of utter glory, where one is cherished and cradled, sheltered and supported, and, most of all, where one's very essence is acknowledged and appreciated in a manner both simple and sublime. In his latest elegant and elegiac memoir, poet Doty recounts how the love of two dogs, Arden and Beau, sustained him during times of his most grievous losses, and how he, in turn, came to nurse them through their inevitable years of failing health. On the brink of a life-threatening depression, Doty recognized the necessity of caring for his beloved dogs, which then metamorphosed into a life-affirming realization that he was, in fact, the one being attended. Sprinkled among poignant and merry anecdotes about typical and peculiar doggie behavior are Doty's tender yet cogent reflections on the underlying truths such conduct reveals about the canine species, observations that transcendently celebrate the essential connection between man and pet. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"A dazzling, tactile grasp of the world... both arresting and touching." -- New York Times Book Review

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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

"Poignant, intelligent, and quite simply superb." -- Library Journal (starred)

"Rather amazing...A profound reflection on hope, and a song of praise for the dead." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Customer Reviews

Love and Pain
As an owner of two dachshunds, Dog Years struck a deep chord within me. Doty touches deeply on the uniqueness of each beloved animal, and does so with grace and sensitivity. To me, the book was largely a metaphor for life, which is surrounded by both love and pain, both of which are amplified as we grow older. In this sense, Dog Years was very much a memoir about Doty's life following the death of his partner, Wally. Dog Years is more poetic than his earlier memoirs, possibly because the challenges of advancing years are not as concrete as surviving a difficult childhood (Firebird) or the death of a spouse (Heaven's Coast). But this format works well for me, and it seemed to work well for Doty. Thank you, Mark, for sharing this new phase of your life with us.

A disappointment, as both memoir and "dog book"
I was really looking forward to Doty's so-called memoir, Dog Years, but it just didn't deliver. While there are some fine and moving passages here and there about loss and loving an animal, this book doesn't really qualify as a true "memoir," and it's not much of a "dog book" either. If you want to read a good dog book/memoir, try Hal Borland's classic, The Dog Who Came to Stay. It's great. Doty's effort simply strays too far afield from either genre to suit my apparently plebian tastes. There are sections here, littered with quotes from Emily Dickinson and Doty's ruminations on same, or references to Cezanne or Heraclitus, which could have been lifted from his Freshman poetry lectures, which is not what I expected - or wanted. Maybe there is so little about Doty because he's already written two memoirs. Well, okay; but don't call this a memoir, because it's not. I'm tempted to read his first memoir; maybe that would be a real one, but this book is sub-titled under false pretenses. The narrative meanders here and there and sometimes I wondered where the hell he was going with it. It was a struggle just to finish it. Sorry, Mark. Write a memoir or write poetry, but don't try to do both at once. - Tim Bazzett, author of Pinhead: A Love Story

Simply superb.
Mark Doty has penned an absolute gem of a memoir that touches not only on our umbreakable bonds with our animals, but also with our mates and the many places that we will call "home" throughout our lives - and the grief that we all must embrace and learn from in the loss of all of these. His story of Wally, Arden and Beau is a masterpiece of the heartfelt thoughts and feelings that all dog owners will experience if they are lucky enough to be loved unconditionally by one, or more, beloved human beings and furry angels.
In Chapter 15, after the recent death of his mate, Wally, and one of his dogs, Beau, Doty tells us of an abandoned dog that he befriends on Calle Canal in San Miquel de Allende, a hill town north of Mexico City.
He tries to rescue her and is heartbroken to have to leave her behind, writing, "I am grateful to have felt even this sharp sadness. 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?"
I finished the book in one day. And if you aren't into full throttle tears by Chapter 16 & 17 (the final chapters), then you have never known the joy and anticipation of there being "someone at home, waiting to go for a walk."