On Elizabeth Bishop

by
Colm Tóibín
Published in 2015
by Princeton University Press

In this book, novelist Colm Tóibín's close readings chisel down Elizabeth Bishop’s almost monolithic masterpieces to their personal cores. Moreover, readers will see, poem to poem, how much Bishop’s gift for restraint and observation have impacted Tóibín’s writing. The result is not only a valuable study of a master poet, but a testament to how one writer can become a compass, and an engine, for another.