On Elizabeth Bishop

Starred review from January 19, 2015
Novelist Tóibín (Nora Webster) gives an intimate and engaging look at Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry and its influence on his own work. Tóibín begins with an account of Bishop’s guiding principles for writing poetry, including that the words be “precise and exact.” The same precision that Tóibín finds in Bishop’s work marks his writing here. Without attempting a comprehensive biography, he traces Bishop’s life from her childhood in Nova Scotia to her moves to Key West and later to Boston, detailing turning points like her mother’s time in a mental institution and the suicide of her lover Lota de Macedo Soares. Other writers appear, either through their own relationships with Bishop—such as Thom Gunn, Mary McCarthy, Marianne Moore, and Robert Lowell, whom Bishop called her best friend—or in comparison with Bishop as writers, such as James Joyce. The portrait of Bishop that emerges shows her as protective of her voice as a poet, reserved, but not unkind, and “distant from the reader.” Tóibín is also present in the book, and his relationship to Bishop’s work and admiration of her style gives the book much of its power. Whether one is familiar with Bishop’s life and work or is looking to Tóibín to learn more, this book will appeal to many readers.

December 15, 2014
An admiring critical portrait of a great American poet and a master of subtlety. For Irish novelist Toibin (Humanities/Columbia Univ.; Nora Webster, 2014), the power of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) isn't just in her rich sensory and physical details, but in her restraint. Her strength, he writes, is in "the space between the words, in the hovering between tones at the end of stanzas." Bishop's poems aren't abstract; they bear vivid witness to every place she ever lived, from her native Boston to Nova Scotia to Brazil, as well as all the people, roosters, fish and moose she encountered along the way. But rather than confront her subjects head-on, Toibin writes, "she buried what mattered to her most in her tone, and it is this tone that lifts the best poems she wrote to a realm beyond their own occasion." She was, likewise, circumspect about her private life; rather than openly address her lesbianism, she found security in "closets, closets and more closets." Famously disciplined and a constant reviser-decades could lapse between inspiration and publication-she loathed the instant gratification of confessional poetry and was miffed when her friend Robert Lowell raided her letters for material. In Bishop-like fashion, Toibin approaches his subject both directly and not. He responds to her personally, seeing a fellow restless spirit whose work "dealt with the pull toward a place despite the lure of elsewhere." To get a fix on Bishop at the macro level, he weighs her against the competition, which proves more fruitful in some cases (Lowell and Bishop's mentor Marianne Moore) than others. The book loses steam when Toibin tries making an extended and rather dull case that Bishop and her younger contemporary Thom Gunn were virtual peas in a pod. An inspiring appreciation from one writer to another.

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March 15, 2015

Irish novelist Toibin (Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities, Columbia Univ.; Nora Webster) provides a personalized account of poet Elizabeth Bishop's (1911-79) life and works and their influence on his own work as a writer after he discovered her poetry at age 19. Toibin notes the deep sense of loss pervading Bishop's experience and writing resulting from the loss of her parents and childhood home and later of her female lover. Over the course of her life, Bishop lived in Massachusetts, Nova Scotia, Key West, and Brazil, and her poetry reflects a strong connection to these places. In revealing details of his own life, Toibin explains why he shares Bishop's sense of defeat and of exile, as he also lost his father at a young age and has lived in various settings on different continents. In addition, he identifies with Bishop as a gay writer. Analyses of some of the poems are included, focusing on Bishop's attention to detail and insistence on precise descriptions and noting the influence of Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore on her work. VERDICT Recommended for followers of both writers.--Denise J. Stankovics, Vernon, CT

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