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Prosa
O Brasil teve a sorte de abrigar por muitos anos, entre as décadas de 1950 e 70, a extraordinária viajante que foi Elizabeth Bishop, autora de uma das obras poéticas mais belas e sólidas do século XX. Não menos genial, sua prosa aparece agora reunida neste volume, traduzido e anotado pelo também poeta Paulo Henriques Britto.
A edição inclui a maioria dos textos publicados anteriormente em Esforços do afeto e outras histórias (Companhia das Letras, 1996) e acrescenta uma seleção do material divulgado em Prose , livro organizado pelo crítico e poeta Lloyd Schwartz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), com artigos que tematizam o Brasil, a correspondência com Anne Stevenson e, para exemplificar a produção juvenil de Bishop, uma análise da poesia de Gerard Manley Hopkins, produzida quando a autora era estudante universitária.
Além de um deleite literário - com uma ficção que beira o memorialismo e memórias e ensaios que bem poderiam ser ficções -, este é também um livro indispensável para se conhecer as fontes concretas da poesia de Bishop.
A edição inclui a maioria dos textos publicados anteriormente em Esforços do afeto e outras histórias (Companhia das Letras, 1996) e acrescenta uma seleção do material divulgado em Prose , livro organizado pelo crítico e poeta Lloyd Schwartz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), com artigos que tematizam o Brasil, a correspondência com Anne Stevenson e, para exemplificar a produção juvenil de Bishop, uma análise da poesia de Gerard Manley Hopkins, produzida quando a autora era estudante universitária.
Além de um deleite literário - com uma ficção que beira o memorialismo e memórias e ensaios que bem poderiam ser ficções -, este é também um livro indispensável para se conhecer as fontes concretas da poesia de Bishop.
344 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
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About the author
Elizabeth Bishop
144 books591 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and writer from Worcester, Massachusetts. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956. and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. She is considered one of the most important and distinguished American poets of the 20th century.
Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and writer from Worcester, Massachusetts. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956. and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. She is considered one of the most important and distinguished American poets of the 20th century.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
April 8, 2024
I love Bishop’s prose at times (perhaps even more than her poetry), but, geez, I do not care in the slightest about her experiences in Brazil, especially because of the weirdly anthropological way she writes about its people, as if she were studying them from an ivory tower instead of living among them, which made a good number of these pieces bore me to tears. Others were delightful, though, such as “A Mouse and Mice.”
February 21, 2020
There are a half dozen stories in this collection (mostly about her childhood in Boston and Canada) that will steal your heart. I consider Bishop one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century and here she proves to be an almost equally brilliant story teller!
March 6, 2008
I read this book while sweltering in the steaming summer of Key West and was charmed to be sitting on the patio of a coffee shop on Duval Street as I read about what it looked like in decades past, surrounded still by the colorful characters and crowing roosters that draw so many artists to its tiny shacks and crowded streets. It is just one of the remote places Elizabeth Bishop chose to spend part of her life and the one where she tried to train her typing hands to draw and paint. I found this fact interesting as I read this collection of her prose writing, another art form that she was adept at, but still not the one for which she is remembered (that is saved for her sublime poetry). Overall, this is an impressive collection of essays and stories, although the cumulative quality is not as consistent as reading a collection of her poems. Her choice of detail and ability to linger on a moment for as long as is needed to find its larger significance reveal her poetic genius, but sometimes bog down the flow of these longer pieces. It is when she takes her poet’s eye and broadens it just enough to fill the larger scope of prose that she’s most successful, such as in “The Country Mouse” and “The Sea & Its Shore” where she communicates her astute observations about human psychology through poetic devices such as personification and metaphor.
March 25, 2023
La primera y última vez que leí a Bishop (Poesía completa) fue hace casi exactamente dos años, en otoño de 2021,,, sarna con gusto no pica.
Aparte del clima que me pone más ciclotímico de lo usual, un poco me deprime esta mujer. Está todo bien escrito, pero ella es tannn fría; cuando leí sus poemas me acuerdo que pensé en "poeta objetiva" —o algo por el estilo, casi del orden de Wh17m4n—, calculadora, like a man, muy gris, el olor del pavimento, siempre es como si se estuviera guardando algo (los sentimientos💀). Igual me había gustado, all these things eran la esencia de sus poemas, y aparecen también en esta prosa, compuesta ampliamente por memorias, algunos ensayos, cartas y un par de cuentos; esta vez no me movió un pelo.
Los relatos —cinco o seis en total— ni van ni vienen, las cartas igual, algunos ensayos están bien (probablemente lo mejor, a falta de otra cosa, aunque se pone muy conservadora y escribe mucho sobre Marianne Moore, la reyna de las densas), pero to be honest si hubiese sabido que el 70% del libro iban a ser memorias, no lo hubiera comprado. No me parece justo sacarle el cuero por cosas que no estoy seguro de si efectivamente publicó, pero lo voy a hacer igual porque me salió como 10 lucas, me fumé 800 páginas y fue mi autoregalo de cumpleaños. Toda escritura autobiográfica que me cruzo suele destacarse por quién narra, por cómo lo hace o por qué es lo que está siendo narrado —las tres en el más milagroso de los casos—, y Bishop es tremendamente aburrida, no tiene ni emociones ni acontecimientos. Lo que escribe no es suficientemente interesante, ni intenta hacerlo, and this one goes to la editorial por presentarlas como Memorias™️: no hay cohesión que alcance como para poder decir que son memorias y que de alguna manera recuerden a quien narra, más bien son fragmentos autobiográficos muy dispersos.
Además me tiene los huevos llenos escribiendo sobre Brasil como si fuera Holocausto caníbal o The African Queen. Y la cantidad de personajes/personas que mueren en lo que escribe, por dios, without love I feel the abyss, understand your fear of death.
(ft. la Librería Hernández que me lo mandó sin sobrecubierta y con la portada acuchillada, aunque esto último creo que fui yo al abrirlo)
Aparte del clima que me pone más ciclotímico de lo usual, un poco me deprime esta mujer. Está todo bien escrito, pero ella es tannn fría; cuando leí sus poemas me acuerdo que pensé en "poeta objetiva" —o algo por el estilo, casi del orden de Wh17m4n—, calculadora, like a man, muy gris, el olor del pavimento, siempre es como si se estuviera guardando algo (los sentimientos💀). Igual me había gustado, all these things eran la esencia de sus poemas, y aparecen también en esta prosa, compuesta ampliamente por memorias, algunos ensayos, cartas y un par de cuentos; esta vez no me movió un pelo.
Los relatos —cinco o seis en total— ni van ni vienen, las cartas igual, algunos ensayos están bien (probablemente lo mejor, a falta de otra cosa, aunque se pone muy conservadora y escribe mucho sobre Marianne Moore, la reyna de las densas), pero to be honest si hubiese sabido que el 70% del libro iban a ser memorias, no lo hubiera comprado. No me parece justo sacarle el cuero por cosas que no estoy seguro de si efectivamente publicó, pero lo voy a hacer igual porque me salió como 10 lucas, me fumé 800 páginas y fue mi autoregalo de cumpleaños. Toda escritura autobiográfica que me cruzo suele destacarse por quién narra, por cómo lo hace o por qué es lo que está siendo narrado —las tres en el más milagroso de los casos—, y Bishop es tremendamente aburrida, no tiene ni emociones ni acontecimientos. Lo que escribe no es suficientemente interesante, ni intenta hacerlo, and this one goes to la editorial por presentarlas como Memorias™️: no hay cohesión que alcance como para poder decir que son memorias y que de alguna manera recuerden a quien narra, más bien son fragmentos autobiográficos muy dispersos.
Además me tiene los huevos llenos escribiendo sobre Brasil como si fuera Holocausto caníbal o The African Queen. Y la cantidad de personajes/personas que mueren en lo que escribe, por dios, without love I feel the abyss, understand your fear of death.
(ft. la Librería Hernández que me lo mandó sin sobrecubierta y con la portada acuchillada, aunque esto último creo que fui yo al abrirlo)
September 22, 2020
A former teacher and lover is the only reason I even know who Elizabeth Bishop is. Never has anyone else mentioned her to me before, and so I am grateful for this. This teacher and lover first sat in a room with me, alone, reading aloud her favorite Bishop poems to me. She tried to find a recording of Elizabeth Bishop reading it herself, but I was so glad she didn't find it, since I loved to hear her read poems, and being read some of her favorite poems felt especially intimate to me. She read me "In the Waiting Room" and "One Art," and after, she told me about how EB was queer, and even read me a bit from her wikipedia page about her relationships.
Like I do so often with my lovers, I came to her through the things she loved--Elizabeth Bishop was not, is not, my favorite poet, though I read all 700 pages of her letters, simply to feel connected to this person in someway, to try to understand some part of her. All the while I thought so much of the ways she was like EB, ways that I was not at all like, ways that worried me, as well as ways I respected. I remember vividly delighting in EB's queerness, and delighting in her relationships with women so far away from her in age (in both directions).
I've maybe read even more of Elizabeth Bishop's words than this person now, which is a strange and interesting thing, delightful, too, in some ways. I think I do like Elizabeth Bishop's prose more than her poems. Perhaps it is because they feel more personal. I especially love her childhood stories, and "In the Village" will amaze me forever and ever. But even in her letters, as in here, too, there is such wealth of observation, description. Even as she tries out a description that later turns into a poem, I like the prose better. It is g e n e r o u s, spontaneous, and often, in letters, performative and tinted with the joy of sharing. Beyond that, I just like very much EB's ways of thinking about things, or rather, the things she ends up wondering about. I gave her a lot of shit for writing a treatise on Brazil as if she were the "civilized" outsider diagnosing its problems, but I did enjoy the way that her "Systems Thinking" (?) pervades that piece and so much of her writing. Thinking about How People Do Things Over Time and Space--how they do them in Nova Scotia, in New England, in Rio, in inland Brazil, in Key West, in New York, etc. She d o e s observe, and in a very real sense, s t u d y, other people, families, cultures, which makes me think about how, as a child, she moved not only PLACE, but also WHO she lived with, and so could observe different family/ community systems.
So, yes, she is not my favorite poet, but I have such great love for her. And of course this.... estrangement, and indeed... horror at the realization that perhaps one is not really as estranged from it all as one thinks, is so clear in "In the Waiting Room," for me. And I do love that poem very much! And I think the end of "At the Fishhouses" will be forever and ever etched into my brain, like no other poem ever will be. And though I do not fetishize her reticence, I frequently and delightfully fall in love, fall in respect (?), with her stunning and clear accuracy, precision of language, which sometimes feels literally embodied in the end of "At the Fishhouses":
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
--the precision of language is embodied here, obviously, but it is also almost as if the water (and really, knowledge) she is describing is her language, her poems, themselves. I don't know man, I think I would just about die for "drawn from the cold hard mouth / of the world" and because I am so exceptionally bad with precision, with carefulness of word choice, and could probably just go on forever and ever with this "review"--which is clearly not at all confined to this book alone, nor even particularly relevant to EB or useful for anyone else--I should just Wrap it Up (what a strange, interesting phrase).
I don't think I could ever truly disentangle my relationship with Elizabeth Bishop, with her work, from my relationship to that former teacher and lover, no matter how far my thinking about EB strays from her own thinking. You would think having my own complex thoughts about EB would erase the history of it all, but I can't seem to erase it. Perhaps I do not want to erase it. The last piece in this book is an old, old paper she wrote where, among other things, she talks a great deal about how the past present future are all influencing each other all the time, are transactionally changing one another, each new moment revising the past and vice versa. This old writing feels a little obscure, early, but still, it has me going off, thinking about many things.
I cannot disentangle this history, but still, I can try to work with it a little more, create some more forking paths in what I take from the language of a person long dead, but alive, alive. I don't think I will ever learn how to be as precise and briny, burning, accurate, as Elizabeth Bishop, but perhaps I should be more willing, more open to new ways of writing, of finding language. In the middle of reading this, and her letters to Robert Lowell, I began to cry about my own history of talking about, delighting in poems and language with this person, my own history of correspondence with her, and how it is lost, and what that loss means to me, and I ended up writing a poem for it--a poem perhaps trying to find its way into some future which is more bearable, however entangled it may be.
You Are an Elizabeth
Wet, warm, the parenthesis find
their way down, down from the corners
of each susceptible eye. Spontaneous and unnaturally
quiet, they congregate and spill, like children, eager
in line. Following the leader, they avoid the ridge
of cheekbone, cut paths along the hairline,
jawline and down, symmetrical, the sides
of the neck. Not the lips of a lover, though they do
caress, become cooler and cooler, settling,
finally, in each clavicle’s pit, strange
and alienated. Like her favorite poet, precise
and distant, I play at resisting that dreadful I
—until the end, where it let it find me,
quite easily, no parentheses needed.
Like I do so often with my lovers, I came to her through the things she loved--Elizabeth Bishop was not, is not, my favorite poet, though I read all 700 pages of her letters, simply to feel connected to this person in someway, to try to understand some part of her. All the while I thought so much of the ways she was like EB, ways that I was not at all like, ways that worried me, as well as ways I respected. I remember vividly delighting in EB's queerness, and delighting in her relationships with women so far away from her in age (in both directions).
I've maybe read even more of Elizabeth Bishop's words than this person now, which is a strange and interesting thing, delightful, too, in some ways. I think I do like Elizabeth Bishop's prose more than her poems. Perhaps it is because they feel more personal. I especially love her childhood stories, and "In the Village" will amaze me forever and ever. But even in her letters, as in here, too, there is such wealth of observation, description. Even as she tries out a description that later turns into a poem, I like the prose better. It is g e n e r o u s, spontaneous, and often, in letters, performative and tinted with the joy of sharing. Beyond that, I just like very much EB's ways of thinking about things, or rather, the things she ends up wondering about. I gave her a lot of shit for writing a treatise on Brazil as if she were the "civilized" outsider diagnosing its problems, but I did enjoy the way that her "Systems Thinking" (?) pervades that piece and so much of her writing. Thinking about How People Do Things Over Time and Space--how they do them in Nova Scotia, in New England, in Rio, in inland Brazil, in Key West, in New York, etc. She d o e s observe, and in a very real sense, s t u d y, other people, families, cultures, which makes me think about how, as a child, she moved not only PLACE, but also WHO she lived with, and so could observe different family/ community systems.
So, yes, she is not my favorite poet, but I have such great love for her. And of course this.... estrangement, and indeed... horror at the realization that perhaps one is not really as estranged from it all as one thinks, is so clear in "In the Waiting Room," for me. And I do love that poem very much! And I think the end of "At the Fishhouses" will be forever and ever etched into my brain, like no other poem ever will be. And though I do not fetishize her reticence, I frequently and delightfully fall in love, fall in respect (?), with her stunning and clear accuracy, precision of language, which sometimes feels literally embodied in the end of "At the Fishhouses":
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
--the precision of language is embodied here, obviously, but it is also almost as if the water (and really, knowledge) she is describing is her language, her poems, themselves. I don't know man, I think I would just about die for "drawn from the cold hard mouth / of the world" and because I am so exceptionally bad with precision, with carefulness of word choice, and could probably just go on forever and ever with this "review"--which is clearly not at all confined to this book alone, nor even particularly relevant to EB or useful for anyone else--I should just Wrap it Up (what a strange, interesting phrase).
I don't think I could ever truly disentangle my relationship with Elizabeth Bishop, with her work, from my relationship to that former teacher and lover, no matter how far my thinking about EB strays from her own thinking. You would think having my own complex thoughts about EB would erase the history of it all, but I can't seem to erase it. Perhaps I do not want to erase it. The last piece in this book is an old, old paper she wrote where, among other things, she talks a great deal about how the past present future are all influencing each other all the time, are transactionally changing one another, each new moment revising the past and vice versa. This old writing feels a little obscure, early, but still, it has me going off, thinking about many things.
I cannot disentangle this history, but still, I can try to work with it a little more, create some more forking paths in what I take from the language of a person long dead, but alive, alive. I don't think I will ever learn how to be as precise and briny, burning, accurate, as Elizabeth Bishop, but perhaps I should be more willing, more open to new ways of writing, of finding language. In the middle of reading this, and her letters to Robert Lowell, I began to cry about my own history of talking about, delighting in poems and language with this person, my own history of correspondence with her, and how it is lost, and what that loss means to me, and I ended up writing a poem for it--a poem perhaps trying to find its way into some future which is more bearable, however entangled it may be.
You Are an Elizabeth
Wet, warm, the parenthesis find
their way down, down from the corners
of each susceptible eye. Spontaneous and unnaturally
quiet, they congregate and spill, like children, eager
in line. Following the leader, they avoid the ridge
of cheekbone, cut paths along the hairline,
jawline and down, symmetrical, the sides
of the neck. Not the lips of a lover, though they do
caress, become cooler and cooler, settling,
finally, in each clavicle’s pit, strange
and alienated. Like her favorite poet, precise
and distant, I play at resisting that dreadful I
—until the end, where it let it find me,
quite easily, no parentheses needed.
February 26, 2021
A very excellent collection of essays written from personal memories and a few fictional short stories. Of the memories my favorites are "Primer Class" about learning her letters as a small child (I couldn't help but think, as I read, how far she was able to take those lessons), "The Diary of Helena Morley" one of a few stories about her years in Brazil and the best essay "Efforts of Affection" a wonderful recounting of her friendship with Marianne Moore. Of the short stories my favorites were "The Baptism" about a woman wanting to be baptized, "In Prison" about someone who thinks they would like to live in a prison cell and two excellent stories "Memories of Uncle Neddy" and "In the Village" that were written as if they could have been part of the memories essays but apparently were fictional. As far as I know this is the only book of prose written by Elizabeth Bishop which is a shame because I would love to read more from her.
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November 6, 2025Pas la lecture la plus palpitante mais:
"Ruy was talking about T. S. Eliot. He read, English some, but spoke not a word. I tried a story about Ezra Pound. It was very well received but, I felt, not understood. I undertook some more literary anecdotes. Smiling politely, Ruy waited for every joke until the faithful M. had helped me put them into Portuguese. Often they proved to be untranslatable."p.113
"Then the mechanists collected us; in we got, out again, in again, and finally off." P.116
"Marianne was intensely interested in the techniques of things-how camellias are grown; how the quartz prisms work in crystal clocks; how the pangolin can close up his ear, nose, and eye apertures and walk on the outside edges of his hands "and save the claws / for digging": how to drive a car; how the best pitchers throw a baseball; how to make a figurehead for her nephew's sailboat. The exact way in which anything's was done, or made, or functioned, was poetry to her."
"Ruy was talking about T. S. Eliot. He read, English some, but spoke not a word. I tried a story about Ezra Pound. It was very well received but, I felt, not understood. I undertook some more literary anecdotes. Smiling politely, Ruy waited for every joke until the faithful M. had helped me put them into Portuguese. Often they proved to be untranslatable."p.113
"Then the mechanists collected us; in we got, out again, in again, and finally off." P.116
"Marianne was intensely interested in the techniques of things-how camellias are grown; how the quartz prisms work in crystal clocks; how the pangolin can close up his ear, nose, and eye apertures and walk on the outside edges of his hands "and save the claws / for digging": how to drive a car; how the best pitchers throw a baseball; how to make a figurehead for her nephew's sailboat. The exact way in which anything's was done, or made, or functioned, was poetry to her."
March 21, 2019
The first half of the book were memories, one from kindergarten ( in 1915) and another was her first job after graduating college ( during the depression) another was what it was like living in a small Brazilian town ( 1977). Other stories were from various stages of her life, like the time she was removed from the poor side of the family to live with the rich relatives, or the time she met a famous poetess.
The other half of the book was made up stories. Some were pretty good; others I found a bit rambling. Altogether this book is worth reading.
I really wish she would have kept a diary. She was a lesbian living during a time when that was not accepted. A diary describing her confusion, her difficulties, her thought processes regarding her decisions, it all would have been fascinating. She sounds like she had many adventures
The other half of the book was made up stories. Some were pretty good; others I found a bit rambling. Altogether this book is worth reading.
I really wish she would have kept a diary. She was a lesbian living during a time when that was not accepted. A diary describing her confusion, her difficulties, her thought processes regarding her decisions, it all would have been fascinating. She sounds like she had many adventures
July 28, 2025
i liked reading it except when I didn't. the kindle says i read 672 pages (out of 719~) which is more than goodreads counts. i liked:
--the story about the baptism at the beginning
--the memoir of marianne moore (the best!)
--the story about the chicken (surprised my friend read it independently at the same time!)
--the letters were nice
--the story about leaving the house and then the house being taken over
the quote on 606 about tragedy/horror/pathos and form was v nice
--the story about the baptism at the beginning
--the memoir of marianne moore (the best!)
--the story about the chicken (surprised my friend read it independently at the same time!)
--the letters were nice
--the story about leaving the house and then the house being taken over
the quote on 606 about tragedy/horror/pathos and form was v nice
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 16, 2024
insane edition from robert giroux. got it at canio's out in sag before they shut down :( bishop's watercolor on the cover is half the magic here. the last, more modernist story "in the village" is the other half.
January 14, 2018
I found most of the book dull except for the essay on her friendship with Marianne Moore. That essay was insightful, engaging, and humorous.
August 12, 2019
Loved the stories based on her childhood especially
October 4, 2016
Considerações sobre o livro:
• Os sete primeiros contos do livro são fictícios (pelos menos assim interpretei). São bons. Não sei se a característica do conto é ser triste e melancólico, mas ultimamente todos os contistas que eu leio (Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor, John Cheveer) tem essas duas características na maioria dos contos, embora seja uma melancolia fria, que não apela ao sentimentalismo ou emocional do leitor. Chega ser mórbido as vezes. E é engraçado, pois a própria Bishop disse "Acho que a gente pode ser alegre e ao mesmo tempo profundo! - ou seja, como ser grave sem gemer", mas em geral não encontrei alegria em seus contos, talvez com seus poemas seja diferente.
• Os contos restantes são baseados na infância e vida adulta dela (novamente: assim os interpretei), o pai morreu quando ela tinha oito meses e a mãe (quatro anos depois) deu sinais de insanidade e (acho) foi internada em um sanatório. Tem um conto que fala sobre isso.
• Depois começa o relato do período que ela viveu no Brasil, a visita à Brasilia, aos indios, igrejas, Rio de Janeiro. Enfim, achei um pouco chato. Principalmente o relato sobre Brasília - na época em construção - achei bem cansativo. Não acho que foi ruim, só não me interessei. O momento que em o Brasil vive, essa corrupção desenfreada, desorganização, inflação e crise econômica..e ver tudo isso relatado novamente em outra época (1965), sinceramente não me anima. O relato sobre o Rio de Janeiro é bem mais interessante.
• Elizabeth Bishop era poetisa, portanto sua fama é proveniente dos inúmeros poemas que escreveu. Esta última seção traz uma sucessão de cartas trocadas entre a autora e Anne Stevenson. Stevenson é uma espécie de resenhista e crítica que está escrevendo um livro de análises sobre os poemas de Elizabeth Bishop. Não conheço os poemas dela, mas essas cartas que tratam muito do estilo de escrita de Bishop e seus poemas me deixaram interessada em conhece-los.
• Por último, o texto sobre "apontamentos sobre o timing na poesia de Gerald Manley Hopkins" eu não li. Aliás, nem sei porque ele está incluso no livro.
Acredito que esse livro é mais recomendado a leitores que já conhecem as obras de Bishop, e querem conhecer sobre a sua vida, suas influências na escrita, autores favoritos e amigos escritores famosos.
>>> creio que essa nota mudará quando eu ler os poemas, mas até lá: 3,5.
• Os sete primeiros contos do livro são fictícios (pelos menos assim interpretei). São bons. Não sei se a característica do conto é ser triste e melancólico, mas ultimamente todos os contistas que eu leio (Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor, John Cheveer) tem essas duas características na maioria dos contos, embora seja uma melancolia fria, que não apela ao sentimentalismo ou emocional do leitor. Chega ser mórbido as vezes. E é engraçado, pois a própria Bishop disse "Acho que a gente pode ser alegre e ao mesmo tempo profundo! - ou seja, como ser grave sem gemer", mas em geral não encontrei alegria em seus contos, talvez com seus poemas seja diferente.
• Os contos restantes são baseados na infância e vida adulta dela (novamente: assim os interpretei), o pai morreu quando ela tinha oito meses e a mãe (quatro anos depois) deu sinais de insanidade e (acho) foi internada em um sanatório. Tem um conto que fala sobre isso.
• Depois começa o relato do período que ela viveu no Brasil, a visita à Brasilia, aos indios, igrejas, Rio de Janeiro. Enfim, achei um pouco chato. Principalmente o relato sobre Brasília - na época em construção - achei bem cansativo. Não acho que foi ruim, só não me interessei. O momento que em o Brasil vive, essa corrupção desenfreada, desorganização, inflação e crise econômica..e ver tudo isso relatado novamente em outra época (1965), sinceramente não me anima. O relato sobre o Rio de Janeiro é bem mais interessante.
• Elizabeth Bishop era poetisa, portanto sua fama é proveniente dos inúmeros poemas que escreveu. Esta última seção traz uma sucessão de cartas trocadas entre a autora e Anne Stevenson. Stevenson é uma espécie de resenhista e crítica que está escrevendo um livro de análises sobre os poemas de Elizabeth Bishop. Não conheço os poemas dela, mas essas cartas que tratam muito do estilo de escrita de Bishop e seus poemas me deixaram interessada em conhece-los.
• Por último, o texto sobre "apontamentos sobre o timing na poesia de Gerald Manley Hopkins" eu não li. Aliás, nem sei porque ele está incluso no livro.
Acredito que esse livro é mais recomendado a leitores que já conhecem as obras de Bishop, e querem conhecer sobre a sua vida, suas influências na escrita, autores favoritos e amigos escritores famosos.
>>> creio que essa nota mudará quando eu ler os poemas, mas até lá: 3,5.
May 3, 2009
I highly enjoyed this essay collection. Elizabeth Bishop writes about her childhood, young adulthood, experiences abroad, experiences as a writer. Some of the essays were on topics I found boring (a hyper-detailed portrait of a little town in Brazil, for example), but her writing was so compelling I found myself interested in whatever she wrote about. She writes about old-timey things, growing up during WWI, graduating from Vassar college in 1934. Her writing is really funny/witty at many points but the thing that I loved perhaps the most is that she writes with this amazing, crisp, poetic detail. Everything she describes is so vividly rendered. This collection was a pleasure for me in so many ways. I am very glad I read it. She's also really great at selecting the perfect image to convey physical nuance and emotional nuance -- the perfect image for describing how it felt to leave a good friend's apartment and return to the city, that sort of thing. Really awesome, masterful imagery.
October 31, 2015
Is this all there is? Just 273 pages of non-fiction and fiction is it? Sad to say that this volume contains all the prose we'll ever have from Ms. Bishop who was a master poet, her prose as crystalline and detailed as her poems.
I preferred the non-fiction to the fiction, "The U.S.A. School of Writing" and "Efforts of Affectation: A Memoir of Marianne Moore" being standouts, but among the fiction there are strange little gems like "In Prison" which weirdly anticipates writing of Tom McCarthy (especially "Remainder").
All the writing is great, detail-obsessed, unadorned. Elizabeth Bishop has a poet's knack for building rhythm with her sentences. She has a way with striking images. Her writing never strives to be literary. Instead it seems to be her way relaxing; free of the constraints of poetry she's at liberty to follow where the stories take her. Still, she never loses control, and each work is a polished stone. Sometimes its flaws are what makes it beautiful.
I preferred the non-fiction to the fiction, "The U.S.A. School of Writing" and "Efforts of Affectation: A Memoir of Marianne Moore" being standouts, but among the fiction there are strange little gems like "In Prison" which weirdly anticipates writing of Tom McCarthy (especially "Remainder").
All the writing is great, detail-obsessed, unadorned. Elizabeth Bishop has a poet's knack for building rhythm with her sentences. She has a way with striking images. Her writing never strives to be literary. Instead it seems to be her way relaxing; free of the constraints of poetry she's at liberty to follow where the stories take her. Still, she never loses control, and each work is a polished stone. Sometimes its flaws are what makes it beautiful.
August 13, 2007
I didn't have time to finish this book, since I am leaving the house where it is from. I first read this collection about a dozen years ago, but only remembered when I got to "Efforts of Affection," the story of Bishop's friendship with Marianne Moore. When I reread it, I saw that this story has somehow been operating on me since age twenty. This house's library also contains Bishop's collected letters, _One Art_, which are fun to read in tandem with her prose. My favorite works in this collection are "The U.S.A. School of Writing" (1966), about her job as a "teacher" in a fly-by-night correspondence school in New York; the aforementioned "Efforts of Affection" (c.1969); and, inevitably, a story from her childhood in Nova Scotia, "In the Village" (1953), whose core is burning in the blacksmith's shop.
August 25, 2008
love!
this collection is a mix of personal essays, memoir pieces and short stories. it's gorgeous.
even though these works are taken from all throughout her career, and not compiled by her, there is amazing resonance between the pieces. it was wonderful to get the actual circumstances of her childhood from her perspective and see how she filtered them into "in the village," one of the most crystalline, poetic short stories of all time.
and, it was personally helpful to read about her first job after graduating from vassar. her insights were hysterical and it was comforting to see that even she had some missteps before going on to become the writer and woman she was.
i wrote more about one of her essays on my new book blog, so i won't reiterate--you can read it there!: ourbooksarebetterthanweare.wordpress.com
this collection is a mix of personal essays, memoir pieces and short stories. it's gorgeous.
even though these works are taken from all throughout her career, and not compiled by her, there is amazing resonance between the pieces. it was wonderful to get the actual circumstances of her childhood from her perspective and see how she filtered them into "in the village," one of the most crystalline, poetic short stories of all time.
and, it was personally helpful to read about her first job after graduating from vassar. her insights were hysterical and it was comforting to see that even she had some missteps before going on to become the writer and woman she was.
i wrote more about one of her essays on my new book blog, so i won't reiterate--you can read it there!: ourbooksarebetterthanweare.wordpress.com
September 25, 2009
In high school I avoided Elizabeth Bishop like the plague, just to be contrary. People were forever giving me her books because I was a poetry girl whose name was also Elizabeth and we share a birthday. It was not until I attained a certain level of maturity (and an appreciation for poetry written before the 1960s) that I actually began to read her work and discover how truly unique and lovely it is. I reread the prose in anticipation of sinking my teeth into the collected correspondence between her and Robert Lowell, which I am terribly excited to have been given as gift and was co-edited by my brilliant former professor Saskia Hamilton.
June 9, 2015
I love Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, and so I was thrilled to find a very clean used copy of this book at a recent book sale. This book contains a solidly written collection, half memoir-like vignettes and essays, half short stories. The essay about her friendship with Marianne Moore was particularly delightful. I was happy to read more of Bishop’s strong voice, but on the whole, I confess that I found this book a bit dull. Her poetry has much more life and vigor than her prose, I think, but there are certainly some lovely, swooning passages in here.
May 21, 2013
I didn't read all of this book of course--I never intended to. And I may read more of it later. Her memoir essays are mostly very very fine, well observed, funny, sometimes touching. Her memoir of Marianne Moore is superb. And her brief reviews or comments on other authors are interesting too. It is probably heresy for me to say this, but I think it's possible that, 50 years from now, people might treasure her prose more than her poetry.
August 2, 2018
Bishop’s style of carefully setting the scene then adding revelatory twist on top of revelatory twist is delightful. Her world is dated by 50 years and mire, yet her storytelling is superb, as are her characterizations.
“In the Village and”Primer Class” are excellent reads.
My favorite is “Efforts of Affection: A Memoir ofMarianne Moore” who for many years was Bishops mentor and friend.
“In the Village and”Primer Class” are excellent reads.
My favorite is “Efforts of Affection: A Memoir ofMarianne Moore” who for many years was Bishops mentor and friend.
November 13, 2010
bought this book on special order from my local bookshop (gleebooks on glebe point rd, sydney) during the height of my lowell mania. i got over liz even quicker than i did bob. nice stories about brazil though.
May 9, 2008
I love Bishop's writing, her poems and her essays, and stories (this is a collection of the latter two). Many of these cover her early life, memories of Prince Edward Island. Very beautiful, evocative. She's without a doubt one of my very favorite poets.
October 4, 2014
Her prose is so delightful. I think I like her prose more than her poetry. I really enjoyed reading "Primer Class" and "Efforts of Affection." I found it really funny, the way she described Marianne Moore.
February 1, 2015
Bishop's prose is as detailed and lovely as her poems. I particularly loved her remembrance of Marianne Moore. Her essays although personal have the same objective voice as her poems, which makes them a delight to read in this era of the ego-driven memoir.
July 27, 2007
There's a few very good stories but I think she was a better poet.
December 8, 2007
The last story was pretty good.
It's obvious she went to Walnut Hill. She's very good at networking.
It's obvious she went to Walnut Hill. She's very good at networking.
Currently reading
December 29, 2008so good
July 7, 2011
If Elizabeth Bishop wrote essays about Chemistry or Waste Management, I would read those too.
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November 5, 2012I liked the story about Moore, the others I skimmed through, and didn't appreciate as much. She mentions her "friend" briefly.
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