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A Collection poetry written in, around, and about the Low Country of South Carolina. It includes pets, inspiration, freedom, and general life. ... Read more

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Read by the Poet
One Cassette, 1 hour

The second installment of our exclusive The Voice of the Poet series, comprised of rare archival recordings, some never before released, featuring the acclaimed Elizabeth Bishop.

This audio production is accompanied by a book containing the text to the poems and a commentary by J.D. McClatchy.Amazon.com Review
In her readings, Elizabeth Bishop extended what James Merrill termed her"instinctive, modest, life-long impersonation of an ordinary woman."Eschewing the grandiosity--the extended pauses for effect, the statelyself-wonder--that could strike her contemporaries and seems epidemic amongher descendants, she opted for a brisk clip. In fact, in "The Map," whichopens The Voice of the Poet, she sounds as if she can't wait toescape New York's 92nd Street Y. The collection includes 23 poems from sixdifferent readings, the first taking place on October 17, 1947, and the last30 years later, when she was clearly congested. It is also accompanied by abooklet containing a fine essay by J.D. McClatchy and the poems themselves.

Bishop offers few remarks, so each one, along with eachslight alteration of text, is precious. For example, she brings "Large BadPicture" to a sudden, marvelous halt with "And I must change that--he neverwas a schoolteacher. I think I liked the rhyme." She is in finest form atthe Coolidge Auditorium in May 1969, and particularly loose with the magical"Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore." Perhaps this has something to do withits vocative mode and its irresistible repetition of "please come flying":"We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping, / or play at a game ofconstantly being wrong / with a priceless set of vocabularies, / or we canbravely deplore, but please / please come flying."

Despite Bishop's attempts at invisibility, her art again and again makesitself felt. One is grateful that she was caught narrating such masterworksas "At the Fishhouses" and "The Moose" as well as the lovely "Poem" about aminiature painting, with its "tiny cows, / two brushstrokes each, butconfidently cows" and celebrated riddle: "A specklike bird is flying to theleft. / Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird?" The tape also includes suchlesser-known pieces as "Cirque d'Hiver." Only Bishop could instill awind-up horse and rider with such desperate beauty, wit, and desire forconnection:

His mane and tail are straight from Chirico
He has a formal, melancholy soul.
He feels her pink toes dangle toward his back
along the little pole
that pierces both her body and her soul

and goes through his, and reappears below,
under his belly, as a big tin key.

Customer Reviews (3)

a Treat!
i bought this tape on a road trip and logged the miles spellbound by howBishop's voice and inflection turned the poems I blew through in collegeinto delightful, insightful stories.This tape, and i'll bet the others inthis series, is an example of why poetry needs to be heard, rather thanread.Send these tapes to schools everywhere!

Essential Elizabeth Bishop, but not for the newcomer...
Elizabeth Bishop disliked the sound of her own voice, and often refused to permit recordings (even private ones) of her readings.Bishop's executor, Alice Methfessel, respected the poet's keen protective instincts, andallowed no commercial issue in the two decades since Bishop's death.As aresult, the speaking voice of this great poet has remained a mystery, evenas Bishop's following and reputation has grown by bounds.

I stillremember the shock of hearing Bishop's voice for the first time. Bishop'svoice is so -- I don't know any other word for it -- so ordinary.This isas true on her early recordings (from the late 1940s) as on her maturereadings (mid 1970s).At times, the listener is tempted to think she doesnot understand the meaning of what she is saying: she is so shy aboutdrawing attention to her poetic craft, and so embarrassed about revealingany hidden emotional content, that she almost seems to be reading the workof another person."Don't you realize," I want to shout,"that you are speaking some of the greatest lines in Americanpoetry?"But we must remember that Bishop's self-effacements, howeverineffective in a public reading, are part of the reason why her poems areso emotionally satisfying.Meaning and memory resonate in the most lightlyobserved surface details.

I would highly recommend this recording toanyone who already knows Elizabeth Bishop's work and biography -- it is anexcellent reference, even if it is not the most entertaining recording.However, I would caution a newcomer to Bishop NOT to start here.It is farbetter to read the poems and the letters first so that you have a sense ofthe many masks this poet wears. Another good place to start is thehour-long documentary on Elizabeth Bishop in the "Voices andVisions" series, which appeared years ago on public television(available in many libraries).James Merrill and Mary McCarthy areinterviewed about their friendship with Elizabeth Bishop and make manyilluminating comments.Blythe Danner -- Gwyneth Paltrow's mom! -- readsthe poems of Bishop, and frankly does a better job of it than Bishop does.

Bishop converses...
The Bishop on this tape is a surprise.She reads easily, congenially, interrupts herself to comment on what she's doing.She's funny, and the humor that's under the surface of the poems gets to bubble up at oddmoments.It's a great selection of poems, and it's fantastically handy tohave the booklet of the texts of the poems (some of which are interestinglydifferent from the versions Bishop reads) tucked into the pocket in thefront of the elegant package.J.D. McClatchy's introduction to her workis, as always, illuminating. ... Read more

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In this book, the first study of Elizabeth Bishop's whole career, Travisano explores her development as an artist. Through sensitive reading of the poems, supported by comparison with Bishop's letters, interviews, stories, memoirs, and critical essays, he defines the traditions that shaped Bishop's introspective early work and the evolution of her later work toward a more public style.

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This study charts the evolution of Bishop's poetry, aided by newly discovered diaries, previously unpublished work and early drafts. It focuses on the poet's 20-year residence in Brazil, and attempts to provide a new understanding of Bishop's treatment of love, sex and gender. ... Read more

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Revealing book on poetry and gender
Catherine Cucinella's intense book about bodily representation provides a new way of seeing the work of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Marilyn Chin, and Marilyn Hacker. Its synthetic theorizations, illuminating close readings, and final dialogue with Chin bring the study of the represented female body to a new plateau. This book reveals all four of these poets in a new light, and it gives the best readings yet of Millay, Hacker, and especially Chin. Anyone interested in poetry, gender, feminism, or sexuality will find much to ponder here. An essential book. ... Read more

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In this original study of Elizabeth Bishop's lifelong engagement with Christianity, Laurel Snow Corelle illuminates the ways in which Bishop's Protestant childhood and reading of Christian literature, coupled with her deep commitment to agnosticism, inform the works of this former poet laureate of the United States. Corelle sees in Bishop's writing a sophisticated and sustained interrogation of orthodoxy that exquisitely balances Bishop's religious upbringing with her agnostic stance.

Corelle immerses the reader in Bishop's works and world in order to convey the rigor, subtlety, and complexity of the poet's dialogue with Christianity and its literature. Bishop was a self-proclaimed nonbeliever; yet she grew up in two devout Protestant homes and she studied Christian literature throughout her life. As a result some of the perspectives and prejudices voiced in her verse are transparently Protestant. Placing Bishop's work in direct relation to some of her favorite Christian texts, Corelle locates her within the intellectual milieu of post-World War II America in which she wrote.

The study, which spans the course of Bishop's poetry and draws as well on her letters and prose, illustrates how she incorporated allusions to scripture and Protestant sacraments in a subversive critique of organized Christianity and how her appropriation of three traditional genres common to Christian literature--allegory, pastoral elegy, and spiritual autobiography--advanced her own poetic purposes.

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This examination of Bishop's work - poetry, prose and selected unpublished material - reveal how personal loss becomes implicated in her vision of self and how gender and sexual identity influence the experience of loss in her writing. ... Read more

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A commentary and history of Amish quilts, with 138 full-color photographs of Amish quilt designs, plus 18 additional black and white illustrations. ... Read more

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Beautiful, inspirationalphotographs
I first acquired this book about 30 years ago and lost it somewhere along the way.What a joy to have it back!The color photographs are beautiful and most show the intricacy of quilting designs and stitches. Some of the colors in the photographs are so vivid that the stitching is hard to see.

This is an excellent book for anyone who wants to know the history and development of Amish quilts.The 25 page introduction gives us historic background on the Amish community and explains how the Amish faith is incorporated into all facets of daily life.A subsection of text, "Geographical and Chronological Evolutions of the Amish Quilts," describes why specific communities use, or don't use, certain colors and quilt designs.

The remaining 70 pages are devoted to color photographs, usually with a minimum of two and up to five quilts over a two page spread. In writing the captions, the authors occasionally refer back to information from the introductory text to remind the reader of what is being seen -why the embroidery, why the use of different tones of color, how the quilting pattern was designed, etc.The captions also describe the fabric used and name of quilt design style, as well as an approximate date the quilt was made.This is a beautiful book.

Background of Quilts
This book provides the reader with what I feel is an indepth look at the designs used by the Amish.The spritual origins of not only the quilting but the piecing is fasinating.For any one interested in the history of Amish quilting and the influence their relgion has played in developing their quilts this is a must have book.

A Gallery of Amish Quilts
The fascination with American quilts continues.Of special interest to many collectors today are the boldly colored, handsomeely quilted bedcovers made by the Amish women in Pennsylvania - particularyly Lancaster County - and in the Amish communities of Ohio and Indiana.

These old Amish quilts have a dual appeal - their visual impact and their superior craftsmanship.Some students of modern art are drawn to them because their abstract geometric designs are strikingly parallel to the paintings of several contemporary artists.Other collectors treasure these quilts for their intricate, refined handiwork and their minute stitches.What is amazing, and worth exploring in this handsome book, is how the Amish women, with a limited range of materials and with limited exposure to the tastes and patterns of the "outside" world, have created enduring works of art that are visually exciting and sophisticated.

A Gallery of Amish Quilts presents for the study and enjoyment of all 150 Amish quilts in color, together with splendid balack and white photographs of the Amish people and countryside.Also, a comprehensive introduction gives the cultural and aesthetic background for the fuller enjoyment of these beautiful quilts.

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Elizabeth Bishop is one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. When she died in 1979, she had only published four collections, yet had won virtually every major American literary award, including the Pulitzer Prize. She maintained close friendships with poets such as Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, and her work has always been highly regarded by other writers. In surveys of British poets carried out in 1984 and 1994 she emerged as a surprising major choice or influence for many, from Andrew Motion and Craig Raine to Kathleen Jamie and Lavinia Greenlaw.A virtual orphan from an early age, Elizabeth Bishop was brought up by relatives in New England and Nova Scotia. The tragic circumstances of her life - from alcoholism to repeated experiences of loss in her relationships with women - nourished an outsider's poetry notable both for its reticence and tentativeness. She once described a feeling that 'everything is interstitial' and reminds us in her poetry - in a way that is both radical and subdued - that understanding is at best provisional and that most vision is peripheral.Since her death, a definitive edition of Elizabeth Bishop's "Complete Poems" (1983) has been published, along with "The Collected Prose" (1984), her letters in "One Art" (1994), her paintings in "Exchanging Hats" (1996) and Brett C. Millier's important biography (1993). In America, there have been numerous critical studies and books of academic essays, but in Britain only studies by Victoria Harrison (1995) and Anne Stevenson (1998) have done anything to raise Bishop's critical profile."Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery" is the first collection of essays on Bishop to be published in Britain, and draws on work presented at the first UK Elizabeth Bishop conference, held at Newcastle University. It brings together papers by both academic critics and leading poets, including Michael Donaghy, Vicki Feaver, Jamie McKendrick, Deryn Rees-Jones and Anne Stevenson. Academic contributors include Professor Barbara Page of Vassar College, home of the Elizabeth Bishop Papers. ... Read more

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This highly innovative work on poetic influence among women writers focuses on the relationship between modernist poet Elizabeth Bishop and her mentor Marianne Moore. Departing from Freudian models of influence theory that ignore the question of maternal presence, Joanne Diehl applies the psychoanalytic insights of object relations theorists Melanie Klein and Christopher Bollas to woman-to- woman literary transactions. She lays the groundwork for a far-reaching critical approach as she shows that Bishop, mourning her separation from her natural mother, strives to balance gratitude toward Moore, her literary mother, with a potentially disabling envy.Diehl begins by exploring Bishop's memoir of Moore, "Efforts of Affection," as an attempt by Bishop to verify Moore's uniqueness in order to defend herself against her predecessor's almost overwhelming originality. She then offers an intertextual reading of the two writers' works that inquires into Bishop's ambivalence toward Moore. In an analysis of "Crusoe in England" and "In the Village," Diehl exposes the restorative impulses that fuel aesthetic creation and investigates how Bishop thematizes an understanding of literary production as a process of psychic compensation. ... Read more

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Although Elizabeth Bishop is often viewed as an apolitical, purely descriptive poet, her poems are much more rhetorical than they initially seem. Bishop armed her poems with paradox, oxymorons, and strangely androgynous speakers in order to invite the reader to question his or her own ideas about poetry, feminism, and gender politics. Starting literally with the first poem in her first book, Bishop's work asks the reader to question not only their casual reading habits, but also the very ability of language to represent reality-a very deconstructive move for a poet who eschewed literary movements and manifestoes. ... Read more

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This illuminating study examines Elizabeth Bishop's rhetorical strategies and the way they shape the formal and thematic movements of her poetry and stories. Unlike other recent studies of Bishop, Doreski's does not concern itself primarily with her visual imagery, but rather deals with her poetry as a series of linguistic strategies designed to create the maximum illusion of representation while resisting the romantic devices of self-revelation and solipsistic narration. Doreski argues that Bishop takes advantage of the inadequacies of language, and with a postmodern sense of limitation explores the gaps and silences narrative must bridge with the mundane, the patently inadequate, leaving an air of emotional intimacy without committing itself to the banality of full exposure. This study finds the poems and stories mutually illuminating, but while moving back and forth among her various works, acknowledges the intelligent ordering of the volumes Bishop published in her lifetime. ... Read more

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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.

Customer Reviews (1)

A metronomic alternation of anecdote and response
In this work, L. Gluck shows the reader her true strong emotion, and the enthalpy of love. Her images are gripping -- sometimes stark and at other times lush and vibrant. Common to all her pieces is the ability to move the reader to feel emotion. Maybe it is a sudden gasp of revelation of connection or perhaps the moment comes later, when the poetry resurfaces from deep in memory. Beware, emotions will be evoked. ... Read more

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Elizabeth Bishop is considered one of the major American poets. She is so meticulous and original that she tends to be both under-read and misread. Examine her work through some of the best literary criticism available on poems such as "The Monument," "Roosters," "At the Fishhouses," "Crusoe in England," and "The End of March."

This series is edited by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University; Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English, New York University Graduate School. History’s greatest poets are covered in one series with expert analysis by Harold Bloom and other critics. These texts offer a wealth of information on the poets and their works that are most commonly read in high schools, colleges, and universities. ... Read more

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This book examines the strategic possibilities of poetic self-restraint. Marianne Moore,Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson all wrote poetry that is marked by a certain reserve--precisely the motive against which most feminist poets and critics of the last thirty years have established themselves. Kirstin Hotelling Zona complicates this dichotomy by examining the conceptions of selfhood upon which it depends. She argues that Moore, Bishop, and Swenson expressed their commitment to feminism by exposing its most treasured assumptions: they not only challenge the ideal of autonomous self-definition, but also contest the integrity of a bodily or sexual authenticity by which that ideal is often measured.
In recent years critical studies of Bishop and Moore have flourished, a large percentage of them devoted to explorations of sexuality and gender. A gap is growing, however, between feminist repossessions of Moore and Bishop and recent readings of their antiessentialist poetics. On the one hand, these poets are appearing more frequently in the feminist canon, but the price of this inclusion is usually the suppression of their strategies of self-restraint. While Zona questions the poetic privileging of self-expression, she establishes contiguity between feminist poetry and developments in American poetry at large. In doing so she asserts the centrality of feminist poetry within discussions of contemporary American poetry, thereby challenging the common perception of feminist poetry as an "alternative" (which often means auxiliary) genre.
Kirstin Hotelling Zona is Assistant Professor of Poetry and Poetics, Illinois State University.
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Artfuland illuminating!
The world of poetic criticism is often murky.Having read and loved Elizabeth Bishop's poems, I was disappointed by much which literary critics have composed in regard to her fantastic work.However, Colwell's bookdoes a fantastic job of illuminating Bishop's individual poems in light ofher much larger opus--without sacrificing any of Bishop's artistic visionas so many others have done in an attempt to force the poems to"mean" a certain thing.Furthermore, Colwell's emphasis on howthe body constantly influenced Bishop's poetic vision has not only promptedme to reread Bishop in a new way, but also has prompted me to reread manyof the poets by whom Bishop was influenced, and thus gain a newunderstanding of their work as well.

beautiful!
Elizabeth Bishop's poems are amazing! very tought provoking. Buy this book if you're a fan of Elizabeth Bishop, you wont regret it. it's well worth your money! ... Read more

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Reviews and essays that focus on this great American poet.
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This is the only book on Bishop that includes work by her.
AS the editor of this book, I'd like readers to know that it not only includes major essays by leading American critics like Helen Vendler, Robert Pinsky, and David Lehman, but that it also contains previouslyuncollected material by Bishop herself, work not available in any otherbook. This was a landmark book on Bishop and remains the most thoroughcollection of material on her work: critical essays, reviews, and evenpoetry about her (by James Merrill and Robert Lowell). ... Read more