Culture and Social background

For a start, there were Doty's parents' almost yearly moves from one part of the country to another, common to so many corporate and military families of the era. Doty's father was an Army engineer who had to go where the work was, whether that meant building nuclear missile silos outside Tucson or rocket launching pads at Cape Canaveral.By the time Doty reached his teens, she had entered the ''long tornadic tunnel'' of alcoholism that would eventually kill her -- but not before she had inflicted some grave psychic damage on her son.Mark doty worked as a temporary office worker.After the death of his partner wally who tested HIV positive Mark Doty was in a shock and was the central event in Doty’s young life as both a person and poet. On its publication in 1987, Booklist praised the “quiet, intimate” Turtle, Swan for turning the gay experience into “an example of how we live, how we suffer and transcend suffering.”Through his different books Doty has often tried to say about the pain he suffered due to his identity. Doty’s status as detached observer to his own work was significantly complicated by his next volume, My Alexandria (1993), which won the National Poetry Series contest. Here, Doty confronts the pain of life as seen through the prism of AIDS. after Wally’s death, Doty found himself unable to write or even read. The solicitation of a poem by a friend who was editing an anthology led him to the writing, not of a poem, but of a book-length memoir, Heaven’s Coast (1996), in which he came to grips, in prose, with Wally’s life and death. “It was a real gift to be able to write it” at that troubled moment, Doty told Bing. A sense of loss pervades the volume, and death—in one form or another—is present in nearly every poem.  However, poems such as “Becoming a Meadow,” “Brilliance,” and “Fog,” in which Doty chronicles his and Roberts's fateful tests for HIV, Doty draws as much attention to the joys of life as the sadness of its parting.