Art And Memory In The Work Of Elizabeth Bishop

This book opens a welcome new direction in Elizabeth Bishop studies and in the study of women poets generally, by urging a more thorough scrutiny of artistic memory. Drawing on published works and unpublished material overlooked by many critics, Ellis balances consideration of Bishop's life in the United States with discussion of how her Canadian upbringing influenced her art.

In Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop, Jonathan Ellis offers evidence for a redirection in Bishop studies toward a more thorough scrutiny of the links between Bishop's art and life. The book is less concerned with the details of what actually happened to Bishop than with the ways in which she refracted key events into writing: both personal, unpublished material as well as stories, poems, and paintings. Thus, Ellis challenges Bishop's reputation as either a strictly impersonal or personal writer and repositions her poetry between the Modernists on the one hand and the Confessionals on the other. Although Elizabeth Bishop was born and died in Massachusetts, she lived a life more bohemian and varied than that of almost all of her contemporaries, a fact masked by the tendency of biographers and critics to focus on Bishop's life in the United States. Drawing on published works and unpublished material overlooked by many critics, Ellis gives equal attention to the influence of Bishop's Canadian upbringing on her art and to the shifts in her aesthetic and personal tastes that took place during Bishop's residence in Brazil during the 1950s and 1960s. By bringing together the whole of Bishop's work, this book opens a welcome new direction in Bishop studies specifically, and in the study of women poets generally.

In the fall of 1998, Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, hosted a symposium on the life and work of Pulitzer prize-winning writer Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979). This book collects 25 of the essays that were presented at the conference, as well as over 40 black and white reproductions of photographs relating to Bishop's life. Contributors include: Crystal Bacon, Marian Bannerman, Sandra Barry, Brian Bartlett, Neil Besner, Theodore Colson, Barbara Comins, Gwen Davies, Jeffery Donaldson, Patricia Dwyer, Lilian Falk, Andre Furlani, Gary Fountain, Glen Robert Gill, Lorrie Goldensohn, Michael Happy, Kathleen Johnson, Ross Leckie, Elizabeth McKim, Laura Jehn Menides, Sara Meyer, Roger Moore, Brian Robinson, Camille Roman, Peter Sanger and Anne Stevenson.

"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." -- Publisher's description.

Critics and biographers praise Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry but have little to say about how it does its sublime work—in the ear and in the mind’s eye. Eleanor Cook examines in detail Bishop’s diction, syntax, rhythm, and meter, her acute sense of place, and her attention to the natural world. Writers, readers, and teachers will all benefit.

A collection of essays on Elizabeth Bishop drawing on work presented at the first UK Elizabeth Bishop confrence, held at Newcastle University. It brings together papers by both academic critics and leading poets, including Michael Donaghy, Vicki Feaver, Deryn Rees-jones and Anne Stevenson.

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

In recent years, a series of major collections of posthumous writings by Elizabeth Bishop--one of the most widely read and discussed poets of the twentieth century--have been published, profoundly affecting how we look at her life and work. The hundreds of letters, poems, and other writings in these volumes have expanded Bishop's published work by well over a thousand pages and placed before the public a "new" Bishop whose complexity was previously familiar to only a small circle of scholars and devoted readers. This collection of essays by many of the leading figures in Bishop studies provides a deep and multifaceted account of the impact of these new editions and how they both enlarge and complicate our understanding of Bishop as a cultural icon. Contributors: Charles Berger, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville * Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, University of Notre Dame * Angus Cleghorn, Seneca College * Jonathan Ellis, University of Sheffield * Richard Flynn, Georgia Southern University * Lorrie Goldensohn * Jeffrey Gray, Seton Hall University * Bethany Hicok, Westminster College * George Lensing, University of North Carolina * Carmen L. Oliveira * Barbara Page, Vassar College * Christina Pugh, University of Illinois at Chicago * Francesco Rognoni, Catholic University in Milan * Peggy Samuels, Drew University * Lloyd Schwartz, University of Massachusetts, Boston * Thomas Travisano, Hartwick College * Heather Treseler, Worcester State University * Gillian White, University of Michigan