Poems – Elizabeth Bishop
“Elizabeth Bishop is one of America’s greatest writers, and her art is loved and admired by readers and fellow poets alike. The poems that make up Bishop’s small and select body of work display honesty and humor, grief and acceptance, observing nature and human nature with painstaking accuracy. Her poems often start outwardly, with geography and landscape–from New England and Nova Scotia, where she grew up, to Florida and Brazil, where she later lived– and move inexorably toward “the interior,” exploring as they do fundamental questions of knowledge and perception, love and solitude, and the ability or inability of form to control chaos.”
On Elizabeth Bishop (Writers on Writers) – Colm Tóibín
“In this book, novelist Colm Tóibín offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences―the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Tóibín creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how her experiences of loss and exile resonate with his own. What emerges is a compelling double portrait that will intrigue readers interested in both Bishop and Tóibín. For Tóibín, the secret of Bishop’s emotional power is in what she leaves unsaid. Exploring Bishop’s famous attention to detail, Tóibín describes how Bishop is able to convey great emotion indirectly, through precise descriptions of particular settings, objects, and events. He examines how Bishop’s attachment to the Nova Scotia of her childhood, despite her later life in Key West and Brazil, is related to her early loss of her parents―and how this connection finds echoes in Tóibín’s life as an Irish writer who has lived in Barcelona, New York, and elsewhere.”
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