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In 1952, soon after her arrival in Brazil, Elizabeth Bishop asked her new Brazilian friends which of their country's books she should read. They recommended Minha Vida de Menina - a diary kept by a young girl who lived in a mining town at the end of the nineteenth century. As a labor of love, Elizabeth Bishop devoted three years to translating the diary, a delightful account of a young girl's life in Brazil.
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Customer Reviews (3)

uplifting
This book is fresh an uplifting...such a witty, charming author. I picked this book up in Parati,Brazil and am thankful for it!

Great
Unpretentious, yet magically beautiful.
A young girl's diary of three years of her life in the end of the XIX century in a small diamond-extracting town in Brazil.
Not meant for publication, the author gathered her writings to organize a booklet for her grand-daughters. When she was convinced to publish it, she could never dream it would turn out to be translated into many other languages.
A must for literature lovers.

Charming, insightful, and humorous; life thru a child's eyes
Diary of a girl in rural Brazil in the late 1890's; now translated into English, the book has a charm of its own that transcends time and place. Diary entries are short, so the book can be read in bits and pieces. But should not be missed by anyone who loves life and the often acerbic observations of a child. Sadly, the original in Portuguese is no longer in print in either Brazil or Portugal, but the English version lives on. Don't miss it. ... Read more

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This book brings together almost all of the known interviews Elizabeth Bishop gave over a period of thirty years. Included also are a few selected pieces based on conversations with her. All together they allow her ardent and admiring readers a rewarding, close-up encounter with one of America's great writers.

In this collection of conversations Bishop expresses her opinions about various types of poetry, describes her view of the geography of the imagination in the writing process, defends her often criticized feminist views, and discusses her role as teacher and poet.

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) won many prizes for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. She was graduated from Vassar, where she knew Mary McCarthy. She taught at Harvard, New York University, and the University of Washington and was a long-time resident in Brazil. ... Read more

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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. ... Read more

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I believe McCabe's work to be of utmost significance to the currently deepening and crucial discussion of Bishop's oeuvre.Its interpretations are affirmative and enabling.Its feminism is synthetic and inclusive, liberating to any reader.Most important, McCabe's is the first book to present Bishop's poetry as a successful entirety, a coherent, humane, and progressive enterprise.-Donald Revell, University of Denver"This book develops a coherent and interesting vision of Bishop's work, centering on a poetics of loss and of the homemade.Keeping in view the autobiographical dimensions of Bishop's writing as well as her consciousness of her gender and her lesbianism, the book sensitively explicates Bishop's complex explorations of isolation and connection, her ways of constructing an often soluble self through the imaginative action of memory.McCabe offers insightful readings of the poems, moving easily among Bishop's various works to highlight their connections, and drawing upon an interesting range of theoretical frames.McCabe contributes valuably to current feminist reevaluations of Bishop; she also joins current critical efforts to counter some of the reductive earlier readings that positioned Bishop only as a naturalist, an artist of precise and impersonal description."-Lynne Keller, University of Wisconsin Elizabeth Bishop represents a full-scale examination of Bishop's work-poetry, prose, and selected unpublished material-to reveal how personal loss becomes implicated in her vision of self as fluid and unfixed and, at the same time, how gender and sexual identity inform the experience of loss in the act of writing.Susan McCabe argues that Bishop counters modernist claims for an autonomous art object and an impersonal artist; Bishop's writing never represents an escape into perfected forms, but instead calls attention to the processes of language that construct identity.McCabe emphasizes how personal experience is deeply enmeshed with Bishop's poet ... Read more

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One of the ongoing issues in the study of the English Reformation is how far and how fast Protestant thought and practice spread throughout the traditionally Roman Catholic realm during the sixteenth century. 'Straightening the Altars' examines the efforts of four members of the initial Elizabethan episcopate to construct a genuinely Reformed church on the foundation of the Edwardian Reformation and the ashes of Marian persecution. Spanning the first twenty years of the new queen's reign, it details both the failures and achievements of John Jewel, Richard Cox, Edwin Sandys, and James Pilkington to promote Protestant thought and practice at both the national and local levels. Although hindered in their efforts at several points by puritans, papists, and the Queen herself, these thoroughly Reformed prelates made significant progress in advancing the cause of Protestantism during the early decades of the Elizabethan era. ... Read more

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`They are Not Art -- NOT AT ALL,' Elizabeth Bishop insists. Forty of her pictures are here tracked down and reproduced in full colour by poet and art writer William Benton, who provides an introduction and an anthology of Miss Bishop's formal and informal prose on the subject of art and artists. `If Elizabeth Bishop wrote like a painter,' Benton says, `she painted like a writer. All her paintings are small, on sheets of paper the same size that one might write a poem on.' The earliest dates from 1937, the last from the year before her death. Most are gouaches and water-colours. It was not until 1993 that they were gathered (after sleuthing in archives and among her friends) and exhibited at the East Martello Tower Museum, in Key West where she had lived between 1938 and 1948. This was the first time the world at large knew her as a painter, but it might have guessed at her skills from the poems with their painterly eye and subtle tonalities.Her vivid gallery poem `Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance' comes to mind as readers encounter Miss Bishop's quiet scenes of New York, Newfoundland, Florida, Yucatan, Brazil, her occasional portraits and still lives, vital and mysterious as the poems, but their reality unrehearsed and not correctable.Amazon.com Review
ElizabethBishop was a great poet. It turns out that she was also a rather goodpainter, even though she insisted that her paintings were anything but art.Her visual creations offer intimate and unexpected insights into the magic offamiliar places and beloved friends. Exchanging Hats provides bothveteran Bishop admirers and those meeting her for the first time with anextraordinary examination of her paintings and drawings. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

expensive little rarity
I can understand why Elizabeth Bishop claimed not to be an artist, so why then, was this published.The visual ability of some writers is well known, but not back then, maybe.Also some artists and poets are prose all the way.
This was purchased for a research project.Historical overview mainly.

A Poet's Paintings
Elizabeth Bishop was an elusive and multi-faceted woman. Gaining a glimpseof her through her poetry, some details through her prose, she has remainedenigmatic, despite the many volumes of criticism and biography dedicated toher life and art. Her paintings show us another side of her creativity, andin "Exchanging Hats" we are provided with a greater depth ofunderstanding of her creative abilities. The paintings themselves, spareand pragmatic, are as geographical and domestic as her poetry. More subtlethan they first appear,they illuminate her life from a differentperspective. For anyone interested in Bishop,this book is essential. ... Read more

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"In Worcester, Massachusetts:" Essays on Elizabeth Bishop reflects the growing interest in the life and work of Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979). The thirty-four contributors to the volume--scholars, creative writers, poets, translators, and biographers--offer essays on a fascinating array of topics: Bishop's crucial and troubled relationship with her birthplace, Worcester, Massachusetts; Bishop as translator and translated; her poetics, travels, and sexual and racial politics; her paintings; her manuscripts and methods of composition; and her place in the canon of American literature. ... Read more

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Elizabeth Bishop's World War II-Cold War View offers the first comprehensive portrayal of the poet in mid-century America. The elusive story of Bishop’s national, cultural, and literary politics during the World War II-Cold War period is finally brought into sharp focus as the book traces her life and writing from the war years spent in Key West through her tenure as the 1949-1950 national poet laureate. Our understanding of Bishop is completely reshaped by this study’s unique ability to easily move back and forth between a wide-ranging cultural critique of mid-twentieth-century America and a careful, close, and chronological reading of the poet. Roman's study is ideal for students of American poetry, contemporary poetry, and American literature.
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Customer Reviews (2)

Seeing Elizabeth Bishop in New Ways
Camille Roman's ELIZABETH BISHOP'S WORLD WAR II - COLD WAR VIEW opens up intriguing new ways to understand this great poet.

Taking a cultural studies approach, Roman shines a bright light on Bishop's life and poems. She argues that Bishop was alienated from aspects of mainstream American culture--its militarism and social injustices. She shows that Bishop was a far more politically-engaged poet than one might think. The interpretation of such poems as "Roosters," "View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress," and "12 O'Clock News" are eye-opening and thought-provoking.

This is now an essential book for anyone interested in the ways Elizabeth Bishop's poems intersect with American cultural and political history.

Elizabeth Bishop's WorldWar II: Cold War View
This is an in-depth and insightful chronicling of Elizabeth Bishop's life and work during the "war years" and immediately following. Particularly interesting to me were portions of letters quoted and particulars regarding situations which were current at the time.Further, I am most pleased to see some recognition of a woman as a serious contender in the field of contemporary American literature.We should, as well, consider that the author of this work is a woman writing about a woman. ... Read more

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By offering a fresh look at Bishop criticism that has moved from purely formal concerns and postmodern interpretations to more recent feminist analysis, Victoria Harrison traces Bishop's career, dividing Bishop's work into three chronological periods of activity: her early work, her writing in Brazil, and her late retrospective verse.By examining letters and notebooks, Harrison unfolds the biographical events that influenced Bishop's poetic style, addressing her treatment of such topics as family relations, history, politics, war, love, sexuality, and ethnic differences. Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy is one of the first books to delve extensively into the Bishop archives.Making wider use of Bishop's unpublished work than any other book, Harrison explores Bishop's childhood memoirs, journals, letters, Brazilian travel prose, unfinished poems, and draft material.The reproduction of these archival materials--with revisions, cancelled lines, notes--shows a mind at work and a career in evolution. ... Read more

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Elizabeth Bishop, one of the most admired American poetsof the twentieth century, occupies a unique place in Americanpoetry. Bishop's poems have inspired poets of various schools andintrigued critics, who find her work difficult to categorize. Thisstudy explores the theoretical grounds and enabling conditions forBishop's distinct poetry, drawing from Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism andBishop's own artistic theories elaborated in her prose, notebooks, andletters. Focusing on Bishop's continuous efforts to test the limits ofpoetic forms, it sheds new light on the artistic merits andsignificance of Bishop's oeuvre. ... Read more