SOURCE: Marcus, Peter. “Reflections on Intimacy.” Gay and Lesbian Review 8, no. 5 (September 2001): 42.

In the following review, Marcus discusses the theme and style of Still Life with Oysters and Lemon and Murano, though cites shortcomings in the juxtaposition of text and images in the latter.

Mark Doty's most recent book, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, is a meditation on a Dutch still life painting “by one Jan Davidsz de Heem, painted in Antwerp some 350 years ago, and displayed today—after who knows what places it has been.” In a mere seventy pages Doty takes his reader deep into the painting—with which he became intimate at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art—and deeper still into an examination of intimacy itself, whether with an object or with another person.

Doty's prose sentences read much like lines of his poetry: they beg the reader to pause, to reread, to...