Bishop shared with Marianne Moore a “near obsession with accuracy of detail and precision of language.” This fine biography...
A new biography of one of the most celebrated American poets of the 20th century.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) wasn’t prolific—she published only 100 poems during her 40-year career—but she had a lasting impact on American letters. Pulitzer Prize winner Marshall (Writing, Literature, and Publishing/Emerson Coll.; Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, 2013, etc.) was one of the aspiring poets Bishop taught in her final “verse-writing” class at Harvard in 1977. The experience was so profound that, upon discovering a trove of letters after Bishop’s “close friend” Alice Methfessel died in 2009, Marshall set about to write this biography. The result is a sharp portrait of the tragedies and other influences that shaped Bishop’s life and career. Bishop was only eight months old when her father died. After her mother was hospitalized for mental illness, Bishop was shuttled between her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, a place she loved, and her paternal grandparents in Worcester, Massachusetts. After these early scenes, Marshall documents Bishop’s maturation as a writer; her struggles with alcoholism; her 17 years living in Brazil with her partner, architect Lota de Macedo Soares; her many affairs; and her relationships with such writers as Robert Lowell and Mary McCarthy. Best of all are Marshall’s analyses of Bishop’s poems, including “Song for the Rainy Season,” “In the Waiting Room,” and the book’s subtitle. The interludes in which Marshall tells her own stories may be a distraction to some readers, but the chapters on Bishop are written with often chilling exactness, as when Marshall describes the uncle who drew young Elizabeth’s bath and gave her “an unusually thorough washing” or the polio-stricken admirer who killed himself after Bishop rejected him. His suicide note read, “Elizabeth. Go to hell.”
Bishop shared with Marianne Moore a “near obsession with accuracy of detail and precision of language.” This fine biography demonstrates the magnitude of Bishop’s achievements without ignoring her flaws.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-61730-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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