On Elizabeth Bishop
- ISBN-10
- 0691154112
- ISBN-13
- 9780691154114
- Category
- Literary Criticism
- Pages
- 224
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2015-03-22
- Publisher
- Princeton University Press
- Author
- Colm Tóibín
Description
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. Beautifully written and skillfully blending biography, literary appreciation, and descriptions of Tóibín’s travels to Bishop’s Nova Scotia, Key West, and Brazil, On Elizabeth Bishop provides a fresh and memorable look at a beloved poet even as it gives us a window into the mind of one of today’s most acclaimed novelists.
Get the book
Other editions
Similar books
-
Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop
By Thomas TravisanoIn Love Unknown, Thomas Travisano, founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society, tells the story of the famous poet and traveler's life.
-
Poems
By Elizabeth BishopA Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011 This is the definitive edition of the work of one of America's greatest poets, increasingly recognized as one of the greatest English-language poets of the twentieth century, loved by readers and ...
-
Elizabeth Bishop and the Literary Archive
By Bethany HicokThe fifteen essays in this collection use this archive as a subject, and, for the first time, argue for the critical importance of working with and describing original documents in order to understand the relationship between this most ...
-
Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop
By Elizabeth BishopGathers twenty-five years of the poet's conversations with various interviewers, in which she discusses personal experiences, principal themes, the authors who influenced her, and other subjects
-
Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery
By Bonnie CostelloIn this finely written companion to Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, Bonnie Costello gives a compelling use of Bishop and her ways of seeing and writing.
-
Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast
By Megan MarshallA brilliantly rendered life of one of the most admired American poets of the last century, from a Pulitzer Prize−winning author who alternates biography with a memoir of her own days as a young writer in Bishop's famous Harvard poetry ...
-
Conscious Service: Make a Difference Without Sacrificing Yourself
By Elizabeth BishopConscious Service: Ten ways to reclaim your calling, move beyond burnout, and make a difference without sacrificing yourself will help service providers in all types of human service understand and move beyond burnout and compassion fatigue ...
-
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
By Elizabeth Bishop, Robert LowellEvelyn, John (1620–1706), British diarist F Fabiani, Mario (1912–74), mayor of Florence (1946–51) Farley, ... U.S. ambassador to Japan (1930–32) Ford, Ford Madox (1873–1939), British writer Ford, Gerald Rudolph (1913–2006), ...
-
Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry
By Lorrie GoldensohnTraces the evolution of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry through her writings, including unpublished and unfinished works, and examines how her work was influenced by her lesbianism and alcoholism
-
Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters (LOA #180)
By Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Giroux, Lloyd SchwartzThis unprecedented collection offers a full-scale presentation of a writer of startling originality, at once passionate and reticent, adventurous and perfectionist.