A finely textured portrait of an acclaimed poet.
How her life informed the beloved poetry of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979).
Travisano (Emeritus, English/Hartwick Coll.; Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman, and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic, 1999, etc.), founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society, draws judiciously on Bishop’s poems, prose, and letters—including those to her psychoanalyst, many lovers, and close friends—to create an authoritative and sensitive biography. Bishop carried lifelong scars from a difficult childhood: Her father died when she was an infant; her mother was sequestered in a mental institution from the time Elizabeth was 5. Passed among relatives in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts, Bishop was told nothing about her mother—and never saw her again. Besides abiding loneliness and feelings of abandonment, Bishop suffered from asthma and bouts of eczema. In adulthood, she also succumbed to autoimmune disorders; depression, made worse by cortisone prescribed for her asthma; and alcoholism. Travisano suggests that heredity may have played a part in Bishop’s alcohol abuse, which sometimes occurred for no apparent reason. Often, she became a binge drinker in response to emotional distress. Since she repeatedly attached herself to women who were possessive, headstrong, or mentally unstable, her love affairs could be volatile. Travisano finds sources of Bishop’s poetry in those difficult relationships and in enduring wounds as well as in various settings of her peripatetic life: among them, New York, where Marianne Moore became a mentor to whom, for several years, she would submit poems for approval; Key West, where Hemingway’s ex-wife Pauline Pfeiffer became a close friend; Brazil, where Bishop lived for nearly two decades with the wealthy journalist and arts patron Lota de Macedo Soares; San Francisco; Seattle; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Maine. Although not groundbreaking, Travisano’s sympathetic perspective, thorough research, and perceptive close readings lucidly portray the complexities of a writer noted for her “reserve, calm, meticulous accuracy, and humorous detachment.”
A finely textured portrait of an acclaimed poet.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-42881-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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