SOURCE: Tóibín, Colm. “A House Full of No One.” London Review of Books 19, no. 3 (6 February 1997): 3, 5-6.

In the following review, Tóibín provides a favorable assessment of My Alexandria and Heaven's Coast, but finds shortcomings in Atlantis.

The words ‘HIV Positive’ and ‘Aids’ do not appear in the poems in Mark Doty's My Alexandria (1995); instead, they hover in the spaces between the other words, and they govern the tone of almost every poem. Now, with the appearance of Heaven's Coast: A Memoir, we know that Doty's boyfriend Wally Roberts was dying slowly from Aids when these poems were being written. Doty also kept a diary during that time, some of which he quotes in the memoir. Heaven's Coast deals with each change in Wally's illness; the book is a charting of the mixture of the mundane and the miraculous, if I can use that word...