Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy

by Mark Doty

Overview

Mark Doty's prose has been hailed as "tempered and tough, sorrowing and serene" (The New York Times Book Review) and "achingly beautiful" (The Boston Globe). In Still Life with Oysters and Lemon he offers a stunning exploration of our attachment to ordinary things-how we invest objects with human store, and why.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807066096
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	01/19/2002
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.48(h) x 0.22(d)

About the Author

Mark Doty is the author of six books of poems and two memoirs, Heaven's Coast and Firebird. A Guggenheim, Ingram-Merrill, and Whiting Fellow, he has also received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for Nonfiction. He teaches at the University of Houston, and divides his time between Houston and Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Editorial Reviews

Books like this, that address the sources of creation and the sources of our humanness, come along once in a decade. -Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

"This small book is as wise, sensitive, intense, and affecting as anything I have read in recent years." -Doris Grumbach, author of Fifty Days of Solitude

"A gem." -Library Journal

"Mark Doty's prose is insistently exploratory, yet every aside, every detour, turns into pertinence, and it all seems effortless, as though the author were wondering, and marveling, aloud." -Bernard Cooper, author of Truth Serum

"A dazzling accomplishment, its radiance bred of lucid attention and acute insight. The subject is the profoundly personal act of perception translated into description. Doty succeeds in rendering this most contemplative of arts-the still life-into a riveting drama." -Patricia Hampl, author of I Could Tell You Stories

From the Publisher

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

LA Times

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.
— Newsday

James Marcus

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.

Library Journal