Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art

As the first book-length collection to focus on Elizabeth Bishop, this book has become an essential resource on this poet–now recognized as one of America’s greatest artists–whose poetry, as Harold Bloom says in his foreword, stands “at the edge where what is most worth saying is all but impossible to say.” The volume includes major essays by David Kalstone, Helen Vendler, and Robert Pinsky, among others; a chronology of short articles and reviews, poems, memoirs, and memorials, many by major poets (among them Bishop’s three most notable supporters–Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, and Randall Jarrell); and an illuminating selection of work by Bishop herself, some of which is unavailable anywhere else.

“With the publication of Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, those who have followed Bishop criticism in the past gain access to a handy compendium that will include most, if not all, of the pieces they treasure most. Those just discovering Bishop’s wise and humane poetry–an oeuvre, as Merrill says, ‘on the scale of a human life’–have been saved innumerable hours of library research and can browse, delighted, in this responsible and appealing collection.” –Contemporary Literature