Mark Doty has the rare quality of turning the ordinary into a revelation. He muses on many viewpoints I’m fond of: that the self is necessarily bound up with the world; that love is attention; the materiality of embodiment; an examination of light; how memory resides in houses and compresses time into space (and yes, he quotes Gaston Bachelard); the way in which description is so much more than just addressing the thing in front of you. Doty examines Dutch still lifes alongside episodes in his o...

When I started reading this book I got a few pages into it and stopped caring what it was about. It did not matter as long as I could keep a steady stream of his words pouring into my brain. I can imagine even his grocery lists are beautifully written and make your mouth water, satisfying your appetite without the need to go to the store. This is a small book and he does not waste space with unecessary speech. Each sentence has an impact and the result was that I read slowly and did not really t...

This book is notable for me for a couple of reasons, firstly, due to it being the first e-book I’ve read - such is my favoring of print, and secondly, because Mark Doty, so unexpectedly, swept me off my feet with his exquisite poetic prose. I don’t think I’ve read a book quite like this, remarkable in its ability to compress so much profundity into so small a place, and to have it flow with such elegance and grace. Every sentence seemed to demand of me a pause for reflection. This man positively...

I picked this one up after enjoying Doty's memoir Firebird, so I knew he could write well, and Still Life is one of my favorite art forms, always leaving me with a feeling of "How did they do that!" In this piece, he successfully integrates discussion of the technique with examples of items from his own life that have had sentimental value. Tough to explain, but that doesn't matter as you really need to just read Doty's words for yourself! Don't be fooled by the short length of the book, however...

As I read this book, it gradually evolved from an interesting to arresting work, from writing to poetry, to art. I've never really loved still life as much as I enjoy other types of visual arts. Through this piece I've learned a new respect for still life and now can look at them through new eyes. Through this, there are also new ways to look at life.Mark Doty has a skill for clarifying meaning so well and for using language skillfully and beautifully. The poet shows even in the prose. I have to...

I got off to s slow start with this essay but warmed to Doty’s childhood remembrances of his grandmother and then found his writing easier to follow. Purchasing an old house, shopping flea markets and collecting… more interesting to most of my friends than having everything brand new. One friend has a cultural mind set to not have anything used by another human being. Not even a chair. I find this very odd. I enjoy layers of meaning and history. Ownership brings joy but also holds a double-edged...

Beautiful. If it gets a little precious, whimsical, or far-reaching at times, that's fine. I'll allow him that. Because it's beautiful.

Last night I sat down with a glass of wine and Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, by the poet Mark Doty. I read it in one go and a second glass of wine. I really don’t have words to describe the experience of reading it. Any attempt to express it seems shallow after Doty’s beautifully crafted prose. I will only say that it has been a long time since I read a book that spoke so deeply to me, but this phrase also seems shallow and clichéd. Yet, speak to me it did. This book defies genre, and my ap...

the way he writes is so rich and luminous, this was lovely

I have a backache, I’m travel weary, and it couldn’t matter less, for this whole scene—the crowd and hustle on the museum steps, which seem alive all day with commerce and hurry, with gatherings and departures—is suffused for me with warmth, because I have fallen in love with a painting.Stilleven met een glas en oesters, Jan Davidsz de Heem, ca. 1640Me too, man.

Best description of lemons I've ever read. Such a gorgeous book! Please read this!!

i feel utterly changed by this book. i want to press it into the whole world's hands. the devotion & clarity & care that doty shows each piece of art, each memory, each person & thought, each moment of wonder and curiosity and grief -- it's moving in that sublime, immense way & in the devastating, personal, vital & small way. please read it.

I read this gorgeous little book very slowly, because I wanted to savor all of it. It amazed me how seamlessly Mark Doty's writing moves from considering still lifes (not a type of art I was especially interested in until I read this book) to remembering fragments of his own history to pondering--deeply, surprisingly--enormous topics like art and death and the relationship between the two. He also considers the life of objects--what and how they mean, why we cherish them and what they can teach

Perhaps this type of writing is an acquired taste. It is not, at any rate, a taste I have ever acquired. It has very little to do with art or with painting or with the Dutch - it is subjective (and hence, quite arbitrary) and self-indulgent, and much of it taken up with rather uninteresting memories of his old aunts in Tennessee. It is about mood, and not insight. Just my opinion, of course.

This non-fiction book is about the power of objects, and mostly about the power of still lifes in capturing the power of objects. It is a beautifully and thoughtfully written book, both intensely personal in its chronicling of the loss of one long-term partner and the beginning of his new (and still current) long term love, and the place objects, art, furniture and other ornaments played in those relationships, as objects of beauty and triggers and receptacles for memory. But beyond the personal...

One of the best books I have read yet."Now I think there is a space inside me that is like the dark inside that hollow sphere, and things float up into view, images that are vessels of meaning, the flotsam and detail of any particular moment. Vanished things. Or vanished from my life, at least. Who knows where they might be now, to what use they may have been put, what other meanings have been assigned to them?" p. 26"The still life's movement toward simplicity comes to its oddest--perhaps inevi...

This book is exquisite. This bit of prose is partly autobiographical - dealing with the loss of his long-time partner, learning how to negotiate between commitment and freedom; partly a rumination on the genre of still life and how we identify with material objects in our everyday lives (I have a new found appreciation for those old Dutch scenes and even the odds and ends in my own house). Doty is a poet, primarily, so the whole text is infused with beautiful language. Dawn got this for me for C...

very short, very lovely. reminded me a lot of the goldfinch, it talks about a lot of similar themes but it's a very different kind of book

I re-read this book every year. I will just put some quotes down that I love since I hesitate to add anything to the great poet's already perfect jewel of a book. “The heart is a repository of vanished things: the rock of Gethsemane, jars of plum brandy, whole fruit turning in their sleep like infants in the womb, a heavenly blue morning glory.”“Intimacy, says the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, is the highest value. I resist this statement at first. What about artistic achievement, or moral c...

I’m a bit disappointed.Doty writing style is poetry no doubt, but I expected the whole book to be about paintings and art. It’s too personal.It appears to me that this book is Doty’s special way to express grief or deal with death.I liked some of his reflections on still life paintings even though I differ with them.“It is at the eyes of a portrait always, that our seeing stops. But in still life, there is no end to our looking.” I on the other hand, see endless world in the eyes of a portrait w...