On Elizabeth Bishop - Hardcover

by Colm Tóibín (Author)

A compelling portrait of a beloved poet from one of today's most acclaimed novelists

In this book, novelist Colm T ib n 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, T ib n 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 T ib n.

For T ib n, the secret of Bishop's emotional power is in what she leaves unsaid. Exploring Bishop's famous attention to detail, T ib n 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 T ib n'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 T ib n'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.

Back Jacket

"Colm Toibin's perfectly judged study of Elizabeth Bishop's writing, and especially her mastery of tone, has itself the tonal intimacy of a letter. He explores the places (Nova Scotia, Brazil) and working friendships (Moore, Lowell) central to Bishop's poetry of solitariness and exile; he finds her true companions in this 'restrained but serious ambition' (Wyatt, Herbert, Gunn); he distinguishes the candor of her art from the facts of her life, the emotions of her poetry from its causes. Above all, he honors Bishop's exact ways with language, and his sifting of what is said from what is unsaid in her poetry illuminates his own watchful and patient art as a novelist."--Saskia Hamilton, coeditor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

"This book offers the reader a luminous meditation on Elizabeth Bishop's poetry. It focuses, among other things, on the restraint of her style and the power of the unsaid in her work. But more than that: Colm Toibin meshes his journey as a writer with hers, showing with unique eloquence how her poems have entered and guided his life. I have no doubt this book will become one of the essential texts on Bishop's work."--Eavan Boland, author of A Woman Without a Country: Poems

"Colm Toibin--a sensitive critic as well as a novelist--has written an almost ideal introduction to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. This could become the introduction to Bishop for people who intend to read her for pleasure."--Stephen Burt, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry

Author Biography

Colm Tóibín is the author of eight novels, three of which have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: The Blackwater Lightship, The Master (the Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year), and The Testament of Mary. His other novels include Nora Webster and Brooklyn. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and a contributing editor at the London Review of Books.