Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy

Wow what a book! As an artist myself I swooned over the entire opening when Mr. Doty describes being overtaken by the painting. Every artist longs for someone to be so smitten. Overall this book is such a rare treat in the seamless merging of art & poetry. I'm not sure where in this small treasure the switch was flipped for me from I'm-reading-a-book to I've never read a poem like this. It seems everything became a still life after his experience with the painting, every object thoughtfully pondered, every event given a new view. I don't think I've ever read a better description of light and clearly (thankfully) he got caught in it's magic. Thank you Mr. Doty for such a beautiful book!

In addition to fostering an appreciation of still life paintings in me, this book lit up my senses with the poetry of it all. Mark Doty, whose poems I have read and loved previously, has written a short book here that I could not stop reading. Every line I wanted to read and re-read to savor. Every line I wanted to mark or transcribe to enjoy again later. Like the painting masters he lauds, Mark is a peerless artist with words! What a joy -- full of the grace of life - this book was!

This is such a timely book for me because I was watching one of the plethora of decorating shows on tv one slow day, while cleaning and kept asking myself why so many homes by decorators have items that have no personal or deeply held memories for the people they are decorating for. Its as if in this materialistic world we Americans live in, we see homes with 'filler' stuff. Stuff which is meant to make the place look special like in a magazine. Thus I stood back and savored the pieces we have in our home and reminded myself of what Sister Wendy's works on art and artists had reminded me, which was to be still and realllllly look at a piece if art. Ponder the person who created it. Look at that painting and see the hidden treasures within it. A book to love.

This was a well written book. Very moving! Makes you stand back, and take another look at still life.

Mark Doty begins this book by describing a 350 year old Dutch painting "Still Life with Oysters and Lemon" that he has fallen in love with at the Metropolitan Museum. He then meanders to memories of his "Mamaw" from long ago in East Tennessee-- surely only Southerners call grandparents by that name-- to a poem by Cavafy, to buying an old Italianate Victorian House in Vermont with his partner who later died of AIDS. Along the way, Mr. Doty muses on the subject of balance: the desire to be in a relationship and the need to be free, the balance of order versus clutter, of staying rooted in one place and the need to travel-- and the joy of collecting simple, everyday imperfect things picked up in flea markets rather than perfect expensive objects. There are so many good things to say about this little 70 page gem that one hardly knows where to begin. Too often I read a work of nonfiction and wish it had remained a short magazine article. That is not so with this book. I wanted it to go on and on. Whether or not the author is correct in his analysis of still life painting, he is completely convincing. Of course, his language is always both concise and beautiful and never gets in the way of what he is saying. Near the end of the book Mr. Doty says "What makes a poem a poem, finally, is that it is unparaphrasable. . . I may try to explain it or represent it in other terms, but then some element of its life will always be missing. It is the same with painting." Such a statement perfectly describes this little masterpiece.