A revelation.
A stunning collection of Elizabeth Bishop’s (1911–1979) professional and personal letters, which span more than four decades.
A volume like this is both a time capsule and an artifact. Opening it, readers encounter fresh evidence of the marvelous poet as a compelling human being; closing it, they realize that in this digital age such a book may not longer be produced. In the letters, Bishop continually complains about her typewriter, carbon paper, the erratic snail-mail deliveries and the inability to see her poems in print because her magazines were piling up in San Francisco. At the New Yorker, editors Katharine White and Howard Moss became her principal correspondents, and both would become Bishop’s dear friends and champions as well. The individual letters are dazzling. The principals debate about the placement of commas, hyphenated words, dedications, typography, diction and what sorts of things do and don’t belong in the magazine. The New Yorker accepted Bishop’s first work (prose) in late 1934; they were copyediting her last (a poem) when she died in October 1979. Early in her tenure as a contributor, the magazine began offering her an annual first-reading agreement, which she terminated in 1961; she requested reinstatement in 1967. Initially, Bishop accepted with grace and equanimity the rather frequent rejections (she submitted fiction, nonfiction and poetry), but near the end she enjoyed a steady stream of acceptance and encomium. Personal details begin to appear very early in the correspondence—we hear about illness, loss, frustration and failure, not just from Bishop but from her editors. She was difficult and dilatory at times—losing letters, asking favors—but her poems were peerless. Following her long, luminous introduction, editor and poet Biele (White Summer, 2002), with consummate humility and profound respect for her subject, stays far in the background, appearing only in spare but necessary footnotes.
A revelation.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-28138-0
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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