Tales from the Reading Room (Free subscription) | 19/11/2008
... where before there was only the absence of knowledge. I thought I would quote Hamilton on Elizabeth Bishop, one of the few poets whose work I have read despite the fact I’ve never been obliged to study her. Bishop died in 1979, aged 68 and a highly respected, much lauded poet; during her lifetime she kept a wholly discreet cloak around her private life and remarked with some...
Isak (Free subscription) | 18/11/2008
James Longenbach reviews the new collection of letters between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Quite simply, it's a great and thoughtful review. Why aren't there more of it's kind out there?On the strange relationship of a poet and his or...
Unknowing (Free subscription) | 17/11/2008
... state disintegrates and all his father’s gains are lost. And then you come to the last stanza of Bishop’s poem: why this? or better, why this now? How can you think what she wants you to think? What has prepared you for this moment?
The New York Review of Books (Free subscription) | 05/11/2008
By Helen Vendler Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton The selected letters of Elizabeth Bishop (edited by Robert Giroux) and of Robert Lowell (edited by Saskia Hamilton) have been warmly praised and much quoted by biographers and critics. Thomas Travisano, one of Bishop's...
Books, Inq. (Free subscription) | 02/11/2008
The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell . "Sometimes falling in love is as much an act of criticism as criticism is an act of love." — William Logan
The New Yorker - Arts and Culture (Free subscription) | 27/10/2008
In 1947, Elizabeth Bishop published “At the Fishhouses,” in this magazine. Among those who admired the poem was her new friend the poet Robert Lowell. “I liked your New Yorker fish poem,” he wrote. “I am a fisherman myself, but all my fish become symbols, alas!” Bishop, who was staying . . .
Dialog International (Free subscription) | 29/11/2008
The literary even of this fall in the US has been the release of Words in the Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. No two poets had a greater influence on postwar American poetry and their...
Bookninja (Free subscription) | 28/11/2008
... projects. I knew also that the estate of one of the finest women poets of the 20th century, Elizabeth Bishop, turned down requests for her poems to be reprinted in such books. Bishop took the line, a line that seemed to be echoed by some later poets, that to be in a women-only anthology is a kind of ghettoisation of women’s work rather than helping to establish a more inclusive...
Jezebel (Free subscription) | 26/11/2008
... amazing meal, obviously, but it's also true that those who can write fictional food well — be it Elizabeth Bishop or Maya Angelou — can generally also convey emotion and style in a satisfactory fashion. And as a food prose glutton, we are always looking for more and better meals to read and remember, be it Barbara Pym's salmon mousses or the Sunday Night Lunches of the Betsy-Tacy...
CRITICAL MASS (Free subscription) | 20/11/2008
Claudia Cornejo of Hanover, NH, sent in the correct answer to the eighth and last installment of the NBCC/Paris Review "Name that Author" contest at 6:50 am EST: Elizabeth Bishop. This was a squeaker. Nathan Chadwick of North Kansas City,Mo, hit the in-box with Elizabeth Bishop three minutes later, tied with Vikram Johri of New Delhi for second (Vikram was a winner earlier...
The Economist (Free subscription) | 20/11/2008
An easy yet intense flow of letters, 30 years long THE easy flow of letters between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, two of America’s greatest 20th-century poets, began in 1947, and continued for 30 years. It was a correspondence, from first to last, of an unusual intensity. Although they were both New Englanders, their writerly temperaments were quite different. Bishop wrote...
KR Blog (Free subscription) | 10/11/2008
Public radio seems to be playing every happy song they own, every song that includes the word “change.” Meanwhile I’ve been reading the letters between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell in the new American Poetry Review. Robert’s letters feel like great rehearsals but Elizabeth’s feel choked, written. Elizabeth, why so much name-dropping? Why the impressive [...]
New York Times (Free subscription) | 01/11/2008
Thirty years of correspondence between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, conducted across continents and oceans as their poetry drove them together and their lives kept them apart.
The Sheila Variations (Free subscription) | 03/11/2008
Elizabeth Bishop wrote that to Robert Lowell, after reading one of his poems. An amazing symbiotic relationship - the two influencing one another, loving one another - while living separate lives. I am most interested in how the work affected...
Books, Inq. (Free subscription) | 30/10/2008
... Works on Paper: The letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell . (Hat tips to Dave Lull and Rus Bowden.)
