Grade:

A

Some of the best contemporary prose out there is by acclaimed poets. W.S. Merwin has short essays published. Even Rainer Maria Rilke was known for his literary non-fiction. When reading Mark Doty's "Still Life With Oysters and Lemons," poetry is under the sheets of prose. "Rumpled sheets in the afterthought of a good night's sleep," is an overlap of the genres that is beautiful and worth experiencing.

At any university, poetry class cannot be taught without studying Mark Doty. Doty is a professor at the University of Houston, and with six books of poems, two memoirs, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three other awards for poetry and a PEN prize for non-fiction, this writer has epic credibility. But beneath the fame and success of prior works, "Still Life With Oysters and Lemons" seems experimental and risky, even with his reputation. Devotees, however, expect nothing less than a particular deviance from mainstream writing. Seventy pages about one painting is just that. Art from a poet's perspective ÷ nothing is more resounding.

Jan Davidsz de Heem painted "Still Life With Oysters and Lemons" in Antwerp 350 years ago. Doty asks, "When both are made of paint, is a cabbage any less precious than a golden cup?" Thus begins an intricate story of Doty's personal bondage that could only obtain meaning through the paradoxes of inanimate and mundane objects.

The reader is relishing in Doty's art of writing and the art of still life, simultaneously. "Still life is refuge, consolation, place of quiet. The world becomes bearable because so many elements have been subtracted from it," Doty writes.

In a world as convoluted as we have made it, still life attempts to show us the simplicity of who we really are ÷ by masterpieces dedicated to the matter that sits atop our tables.

"We don't not need to look at things at hand. · That is why home is so appealing, that we do not need to look at it. In the face of the daily, we are able to relax, drift, focus inward. In still life, the familiar is limned with hallucinatory clarity, nothing glanced over or elided, nothing subordinate to the impression of the whole."

De Heem's table is a little more elaborate than a college student's; still, it is substance that is common but sacred, fresh but perishable. "But still life is about the given. And in both senses of the word: that which is always at hand which we take for granted, and that which is offered, proffered, which the world provides for us now. At the hand: to be grasped, to be lifted to the mouth," Doty says.

However, Doty's love for De Heem's painting is framed in the context of his life experience ÷ losing a lover and remembering the house they had shared. He sees a parallel in which he honors an image of one of life's truths. "Still life. The deep pun hidden in the term: life with death in it."

Students who have only glanced at still life, skipped the museum room dedicated to them, and thought that since they had seen one overflowing fruit bowl they had seen every table top are fated to a perpetual disillusionment. "It is an art that points to the human by leaving the human out." If you examine a still life and the oysters and lemons do not appear to be staring at you, perhaps it is because you are unable to think outside of dead-spaced student unions and a $10 million grave of not enough computers.