Still Life with Oysters and Lemons by Mark Doty

Not Rated Reviewer: Meg Reviewer: Grady Harp

Paying attention, revering, understanding and valuing the context of the objects of our everyday lives, developing a sense of what is precious about the world around us, are the subjects of this small book by Mark Doty. His special gift is to illuminate the intensity, drama, and histories of the seemingly ordinary objects with which we surround ourselves. Each time I feel the need to see with more clarity, to stop the buzz of life, I pick up something by Mark Doty. No one has helped me more to focus on the particulars of my environment than he has. And for the first time in this book I understand the attraction that old things have for antique enthusiasts. I understand now that objects carry auras of historical connections with people we have known or even who we haven't known. Always one to flip the remote past TV programs on antiques or restoration, I learned from this book to sit and give them some time, and to examine the meanings people attribute to their finds. I have always liked new things, maybe to give them my own selfish history, but also because I like them to work. After this reading I am more likely to see that the old butter churn in the corner of someone's livingroom is there because it is more than a bundle of wood and copper. It is there because it lived in some else's life, in a different time, and someone's children played around it, and, somehow that is significant and valuable. After finishing the book I went up into the attic and looked around, for the first time seeing the objects as more than a bunch of junk to be thrown out on some energetic Wednesday before trashday on Thursday. I wondered whether the old chest came with my husband's grandmother across the North Sea to London and eventually to Maryland, only to end up in the Adirondack Mountains a century later. I wondered about her life as an immigrant, her travel experiences, her feelings about leaving home. As mark Doty says, objects have auras. We hold them in our hands or look at them and they have the ability to reach us beyond their existence as material things. In addition to the appreciation for the items of our world is an exploration into how they connect us to others, to our traditions, to home, when, at the same time, we are struggling to disconnect to achieve self fullfillment, independence and personal growth.   "On one side of the balance is the need for home, for the deep solid roots of place and belonging; on the other is the desire for travel and motion, for the single separate spark of the self freely moving forward, out into time, into the great absorbing stream of the world."   For Mark Doty the still life represents that tentative, virtual beingness or becomingness which illlustrates life on the "verge." In many of his books he is concerned with the edges, the spaces between, over which we reach to connect with the rest of the world. How we reach out is as important as what we reach for. To observe, explore, touch, appreciate and love, all with intensity, are steps we take as we work our way through our lifetimes of experience. As always, Mr. Doty's work is sublime with many levels and depths to be discovered at later readings. I go back and back to his books and come away each time with something new to think about and with another way to experiment with the intimacies of existence. He helps me focus, to think about the importance of things, events, and people in new ways. His writing opens me, lifts me, gives me hope and a sense of joy and wonder. I picked up Still Life today and felt my fingers tingle. It is more than printed page now, something I expect means I got its message.

Review by Grady Harp

Mark Doty has done the impossible. In STILL LIFE WITH OYSTERS AND LEMON he has not only written an extended essay (read epic poem) about his encounter with a simple Dutch Still Life painting, but he has also produced what must become the definitive map for looking, seeing, studying and describing the essence of art in a way that encourages us all to return to the pursuit of beauty. Doty has proved his credentials in art hisory and art technique so that he is able to find the essence of a still life, rhapsodize on the quality of light as captured by an everyday object that makes a centuries old painting seem immediate to our own home, and in doing so reveals his own history of memories, lovers, favorite objects, the passage of time as participants in the transitory moment we call life. So many art critics and art historians have attempted to find this plane of understanding and enlightment with only minimal degrees of success. As a curator and essayist about art I am humbled and in awe. Mark Doty is one of the finest poets in America today and knows his way with words, with phrases that illuminate his stances, with defining emotions inaudible to most of us. But this small book is more than an homage to a particular still life painting (though on that merit alone he wins the competition!). This is a tender, thoughtful journey toward discovering beauty that daily surrounds us, a call to accept the transitory nature in all things and to experience them while we may. No fatalism here, just a door opened to appreciate the cycle of being alive...which just happens to warmly include the aspect of dying as part of that totality. As in Still Life painting: artists have selflessly recreated moments precious to them, frozen them in time to stave off the finite, and in doing so have left us with miraculous images to incorporate into our psyches for perpetuating beauty. This book is a must for art students, for art lovers, and for everyone who yearns to understand the journey of the soul. As Doty informs us, paraphrasing poetry or a painting as focused as a still life is impossible; by nature the essence has been distilled. Writing a review of such a book is near impossible. Gift yourself with a book to which you will return as often as the author has returned to Still Life with Oysers and Lemon!

Thanks to Keith at www.keithcam.com for use of the image.