IF YOUR response to one of the pet cemeteries beloved of the Edwardians - where active gundog and assiduous mouser alike were laid to rest - is disdain, you will have no means of understanding Mark Doty's illuminating, perceptive and profound meditation on life, death and the adoration of dogs. If, on the other hand, you know what it is like to worship at the shrine of a dog and be in a state of permanent gratitude for her mad, reciprocal unconditional love - you will rejoice. For here is a poet who is not afraid to offer an account of the hellish day the World Trade Centre fell and an anguished description of the life and death of two beloved dogs - with the same purity of diction. Language embraces grief with no haggling about value or degree. This has nothing to do with sentimentality and everything to do with the most profound moral awareness. For, in the words of Coleridge: “He prayeth well who loveth well both man and bird and beast.”

Doty is rightly regarded as one of America's finest living poets - recipient of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the T.S.Eliot Prize. He brings that sensibility to bear on the very weight of a dog's head in your hand, the way they know you are leaving and show it in their eyes, the nuances of their wags. He unashamedly regales us with the silliest details (the way the animals sprawl on the bed between him and his partner) to demonstrate his own inarguable humanity.

For the agonising death of his first partner Wally from Aids demonstrates - like the decline of his ancient black retriever Arden - the profound truth that when you open your heart to such loves, different though they might be, you place yourself permanently on the interface between delight and heartbreak. He writes: “You can only understand the world through what's at hand.”

And if that is the “intelligence and sensibility... complex of desires and memories, habits and expectations” which is a dog - then why should it not give insight into the human condition too?

Jumping backwards and forwards in time, Doty sets the story of how Arden and Beau came into his life against the deterioration of Wally, weaving those stories through with often hilarious anecdotes as well as reflections on everything from the nature of sentimentality to the meanings behind old photographs of dogs. It's an inspired structure, as tight and disciplined as one of Doty's poems yet possessing the same lyrical grace. He's deadpan funny, too: “I present, to a new boyfriend, a mighty set of challenges... I have been a widow(er) for only one year; I am eager to make connection and terrified that anything I love or desire might simply be swept away. I sleep with two twenty-pound retrievers.”

Dogs (indeed all sorts of animals) are increasingly being used in therapy, and psychologists know that just as living with an animal can bring immeasurable relaxation and joy, so the death of a pet can inflict an intolerable sense of loss. Doty is qualified to give utterance to what he calls “the unsayable” about the love of men and of animals, and the unspeakable loss when death claims them all. You finish this memoir like a retriever after a stick, with no choice but to start over again.

Dog Years by Mark Doty

Jonathan Cape, £11.99; 224pp

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