Still Life With Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy by Mark Doty

From the Publisher

From Mark Doty, one of our finest poets, a delicate and sensual literary essay. Part memoir, part art history, part meditation, this hybrid volume uses the great Dutch still life paintings of the seventeenth century as a departure point for an examination of uestions about our relationships with things, how we invest them with human store, how they hold feeling and hope and history within them.

Mark Doty is author of five books of poems and two memoirs, Heaven's Coast and Firebird. He has also received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Martha Allrand Prize for Nonfiction. He teaches at the University of Houston.

Newsday - James Marcus

A tip of the hat is also due to Mark Doty's meditation on what he calls 'the astonishing republic of things,' Still Life With Oysters and Lemon.

LA Times

Books like this, that address the sources of creating and the sources of our humanness, come along once a decade.

Library Journal

Although at first glance this slim volume appears to be a quick read, it should be lingered over and reread to uncover the full depth of its beauty and insight. Combining memoir with artistic and philosophical musings, the poet and National Book Critics Circle Award winner (for My Alexandria) begins by confessing his obsession with the 17th-century Dutch still life that serves as the title of this book. As he analyzes the items depicted in the painting, he skillfully introduces his thoughts on our intimate relationships to objects and subsequently explains how they are often inextricably bound to the people and places of an individual lifetime. Further defined by imperfections attained from use, each object from an aging oak table to a chipped blue and white china platter forms a springboard for reflection. Doty intersperses personal reminiscences throughout, but he always returns to the subject of still-life painting and its silent eloquence. Doty's observations on balance, grief, beauty, space, love, and time are imparted with wisdom and poetic grace. This little book is a gem. For circulating libraries. Carol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, NJ Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0807066095
  
• ISBN-13: 9780807066096
• Format: Paperback, 80pp
• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Pub. Date: January 2002
• Sales Rank: 225,303