One Art: Letters of Elizabeth Bishop

Description

One Art is the best biography we have of the elusive Elizabeth Bishop. Robert Giroux, her editor and friend, has chosen well--and discreetly--from among the poet s several thousand letters. The collection begins with correspondence she wrote while still at Vassar in the 30s and ends with a letter written on the day she died, October 6, 1979. ("Well, I could go on--but I won t!" Bishop writes.) Still, we now have more than 600 pages of witty, well-mannered missives that often shade into deep emotion. Seemingly casual observation is a staple of Bishop s art and a delight in the letters: writing to Marianne Moore in 1938, she asserts that an unappealing stray she is nonetheless feeding looks just like Picasso s Absinthe Drinker. Nor is she any less irreverent when it comes to the lifestyles of the poetic and famous. In 1950, she tells Robert Lowell that she s reading Yeats s A Vision--"or trying to. Have you? Sometimes it s Jungian. The picture of Yeats going Woof! Woof! in a lower berth, in the dark, in California, in order to wake up his wife, who was dreaming she was a cat, is very pleasing, I think."

Bishop often hid her sadness behind charm, but she could also be astonishingly frank. In addition to the personal revelations, there are discussions of poems origins. "Quite a few lines of At the Fishhouses came to me in a dream," she tells U. T. and Joseph Summers. "And the scene--which was real enough, I d recently been there--but the old man and the conversation, etc., were all in a later dream." One caveat: Robert Giroux has kept commentary and notes to a minimum, so it s worth reading his introduction for deep background before you begin.