On Elizabeth Bishop

by Colm Tóibín

In this book, novelist Colm Toibin offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences--the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Toibin creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how her experiences of loss and exile resonate with his own. What emerges is a compelling double portrait that will intrigue readers interested in both Bishop and Toibin.

For Toibin, the secret of Bishop's emotional power is in what she leaves unsaid. Exploring Bishop's famous attention to detail, Toibin describes how Bishop is able to convey great emotion indirectly, through precise descriptions of particular settings, objects, and events. He examines how Bishop's attachment to the Nova Scotia of her childhood, despite her later life in Key West and Brazil, is related to her early loss of her parents--and how this connection finds echoes in Toibin's life as an Irish writer who has lived in Barcelona, New York, and elsewhere.

Beautifully written and skillfully blending biography, literary appreciation, and descriptions of Toibin's travels to Bishop's Nova Scotia, Key West, and Brazil, On Elizabeth Bishop provides a fresh and memorable look at a beloved poet even as it gives us a window into the mind of one of today's most acclaimed novelists.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Biography, Criticism, Literary Criticism, Essays, Memoir

210 pages, Hardcover

First published March 22, 2015

About the author

Colm Tóibín FRSL, is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, journalist, critic, and poet. Tóibín is currently Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University in Manhattan and succeeded Martin Amis as professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester.

Reviews

[Kevin Lawrence · Rating 2 out of 5]

This series has such promise -- writers freely writing about obsessions/affections/influences in a general, unacademic style. Unfortunately, I don't feel like Toibin really delivered in this particular volume. Such a slim volume should be an easy and enjoyable read, but Toibin so often lurches from various approaches that the abrupt shifts in tone makes reading the book feel like a much longer experience than it actually is. Mostly, Toibin takes a vaguely biographical approach as Bishop relates especially to three poets: Thom Gunn, Robert Lowell, and Marianne Moore. But there are occasional autobiographical moments where Toibin either recalls how both poet and novelist lost a parent at a young age or (much more exasperatingly) of Toibin visiting places Bishop either lived or visited herself and that seemingly occasion him thinking, "oh, Bishop might have walked these streets too." The most wearying moments in the book are when Toibin resorts to analyzing the metrics of particular poems (especially her early poem "Roosters") that seem just an indulgent exercise in showing he can scan with the best of them; these parts of the book are tedious and academic (in the worst sense of the word.)

This is unfortunate, because the idea of a writer making quirky and unexpected associations with another writer's work has a huge appeal. When Toibin relates Bishops work to Thom Gunn (not necessarily the most obvious pairing) he is at his best and moves towards that promise, and I enjoyed the final chapter about a painting by the Irish painter Tony O'Malley (who I had never heard of) and how it relates to issues of art and the erosion of time as reflected in Bishop's work as well; but even these promising parts seem half-digested. I was especially surprised that a writer like Toibin didn't have more thoughtful things to say about Bishop and sexuality.

All too often, Toibin seems to feel he needs to address obvious aspects of Bishop's work, and so we get an obligatory chapter on her relationship with Marianne Moore that seems to have been written in a less than enthusiastic way. He does manage to evoke some interesting points such as considering that perhaps Moore is vaguely evoked in Bishop's famous poem "The Moose" -- I love the idea of Marianne Moore decked out in her signature tricorn hat being conflated with a cow-moose! But then instead of letting this suggestion seep into the reader's imagination, he writes the following: "...[the] very title [of the poem "The Moose"] seems to offer a sly suggestive homage to Marianne Moore. ("S," after all, comes just after "r" in the alphabet.)" When I read that, I had the image of Bishop going completely white and then snorting in derision!

I feel like Toibin just called this one in -- he's capable of much better. And Bishop deserves better -- imagine instead of (yet another) chapter on Bishop and Moore (or Bishop and Lowell) he had instead chosen to write about Bishop and Anton Webern, or Paul Klee, or even May Swenson (all artists he mentions but doesn't really explore their relationship to Bishop's work in any depth.) I don't think Bishop readers will really learn anything from this book or see her work from a particularly new angle; and I don't think Toibin readers will learn that much about Toibin or really get a new perspective on his work either. Maybe Toibin should've written a book on Thom Gunn instead (or is that too obvious? not enough appeal for Princeton?)

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finish date: 25 December 2017
Genre: non-fiction
Rating: A
Review: Biography, analysis of Bishop's poems, and her world (trauma losing her parents, childhood in homes of family, friendships male (R. Lowell) and female (Lotte, Marianne Moore).
The fact that the world was there was enough for Bischop and she describes all that is around her. This was her defense.... so she can avoid descriptions of herself. #MustRead if you are interested in Elizabeth Bishop's poems.

[Margaret Ennen]

Reading this book felt like I was back in my contemporary poetry seminar in that I only understood what was going on approximately 60% of the time but I enjoyed hearing from people who could speak about poetry with much more eloquence than myself. This book was more about Bishop’s relationship with other poets than about the author’s relationship with her work, which is what I expected and I wanted to hear more from that perspective. Still an enjoyable and thought-provoking read, and this physical book is the first book I’ve read in which I played a role in its production, so that is really cool🥹 and now I’m off to read “One Art” again.

[Iulia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this quite illuminating overall, and an absolute pleasure to read. Several strands I wish had been pursued in more detail (comparing Bishop's poetry to Klee's painting sounds so intriguing - it was left undeveloped and therefore unconvincing).

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bishop has been fortunate in her critics and biographers (David Kalstone's Becoming a Poet; Lorrie Goldensohn's Elizabeth Bishop). Tóibín provides something different, an intense appreciation of one writer by another. He doesn't hesitate to mingle his own memories and methods with his discussion of hers, nor does he shy away from offering his own analysis of Bishop's famous reticence and control.

It was an essential aspect of her talent, indeed of her gift, as a poet, that she did not manage to confront what mattered to her most. Instead, she buried what mattered to her most in her tone, and it is this tone that lifts the best poems she wrote to a realm beyond their own occasion.

He muses upon her loves and friends. Sometimes it seems he's drifting far from his subject but each divagation brings us closer. I particularly appreciated his pages on Thom Gunn, who knew Bishop from her time in San Francisco, whom Tóibín knew from his time in San Francisco. I consider Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats almost without equal. Tóibín compares its Elizabethan elegies with Bishop's late verse, his taut restraint with hers. (Her grief, I find, is much colder.)

Mostly, though, he pulled me back into the poems, quoting generously and sending me time and again to my battered paperback of The Complete Poems, marveling again at "The Armadillo" and "The Moose" and (my new favorite) "The End of March." He admires her exquisite craft, even more the spirit behind it.

Faith goes; language remains. Slowly, the new faithless language takes on a power much greater than it ever had when it was there merely to express faith. Language is all there is now.

The art of losing is hard to master.

[Josefine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved reading this book, which somehow manages to meet at a crossroads between biography, memoir and academia, weaving the threads together beautifully, broadening the focus beyond Bishop, including other poets and artists, drawing parallels and highlighting inspiration. It balances between the personal and the analytical, connecting the readings of poems not only with Bishop's personal life, but also with Tóibín's own, tying together different places and different times, including letters, and paintings, and landscapes.

That being said, Tóibín has a tendency to drift off into the personal too much considering the book is titled On Elizabeth Bishop, which feels, at times, a bit indulgent. Particularly the last chapter feels like somewhat of a let-down, letting the tension that's beautifully kept throughout the book, drop into his own nostalgia, dilluting the strength of the rest of the work in my eyes.

It also could have used some tighter editing: considering the book itself is fairly short, and written in a way that it can easily be read in a handful of days I think it would have benefitted from finding ways to avoid the repetitions, which, though they may thematically make sense, occasionally feel unnecessary and could have surely been replaced by other lines.

[Rona · Rating 4 out of 5]

When a poet writes about a poet, it is poetry. Beautiful books to exercise my English Lit major muscles.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had just read Colm Tóibín's book The Story of the Night, which I found puzzling at times. His other novels seemed more straightforward, an examination of one character's life in a very straightforward completive way. Reading this book, not only gave me an understanding of Elisabeth Bishop's life, but a completely new understanding of the brilliance of her poetry.

Bishop concluded her poem, "Questions of Travel" with the question, "Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?" She was of course, never sure. No matter where she was, though, she thought of elsewhere.

52 Joyce's sense of his home as a place of scrupulous meanness in "The Dubliners."

14 ...these poems by Bishop are full of resigned tones and half-resigned undertones, but there is always something in the space between the words, something that is controlled, but not fully, so that the chaos or the panic held in check is all the more apparent because it is consigned to the shadows.

48 "What one seems to want in in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration...I have a vague theory that one learns most, I have, by having someone suddenly make fun of something one has taken seriously up to that point. I mean about life, the world, and so on.

68 "Roosters" By fixing "Roosters" in the real, she managed by drawing the subject of the poem so precisely, to have the rooster enact things and possess qualities with immense suggestive power. By observing the roosters closely and meticulously, she managed a poem about power simply by exercising her own power not to overstate the case. She offered a poem of symbolic force by implication only, making it all the more powerful because of the sheer openness, the rawness of the implications...within the form of the poem and its diction. She managed to write one of the great poems about power and cruelty by not doing so, by describing, suggesting, by working on her rhythms and cadences, her rhymes and half-rhymes, by leaving it at that by understanding what might be enough. (a poem about the arrival of morning.

76 the graves in Key Wesy, near which she lived, seemed more stable and permanent that the places where the living lived. 77 When she went to Brazil and lived with Lota, the house outside Rio, was a subject of amusement, as though it was a play or she were acting in a comedy, not quite serious, a pardy of "normal" life.

82 She was a poet whose physical surroundings entered her spirit. In Key West, underlying the poems about landscape, was the notion of death and the idea of violence. Once she moved to Brazil, new emphasis on landscape and description...an emphasis on property and rights.

84 The Moose: trails long sentences through several stanzas playing a conversational slackness against an elaborate system of syntactical and metrical control "...a weak mailed fist / clenched ignorant against the sky." the reminder of the end of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach."

98

100 Gunn distinguished between 2 different strengths that can be summoned in the writing of poetry, one he called, "a very conscious arranging sense, keeping things in schematic form," and the other, "the stuff you can call primitive or unconscious."

Both Elizabeth Bishop and Thomas Gunn made a point of living in and describing the ordinary universe and observing its citizens. They wrote poems about the slightest things. Their poems move constantly between tones and textures that loosen and tighten and loosen again, which speak clearly and then hush and quieten (?) more

101 Gunn wrote about Gary Snyder "Like most serious poets, he is concerned about finding himself on a barely known planet, in an almost unknown universe, where he must attempt to create and discover meanings.

101-02
107 I don't want to be Sylvia Plath.
108
109
113
122t
138t
143 t and b
146
154b 155b
162t
164b 165t
168 Gunn's miserable lines complaining of confessional poems
177t

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

In lucid prose, Colm Toibin lays out his case for Elizabeth Bishop's sensibility as close to his because of their upbringing on similar Atlantic seacoasts. While Toibin is Irish, and grew up in Enniscorthy, and Bishop was born in Nova Scotia, both writers had more in common than geography. Toibin writes sensitively of Bishop's need to remain a closeted lesbian. He describes her style as tactful and measured, and refers to her describing herself as being very similar to the sandpiper of her most excellent poem. Toibin explores her biography, her relationship with other poets such as Lowell, Thom Gunn, and May Swenson and Marianne Moore. Perfectly selected excerpts from letters and other critics' treatment of Bishop's work make this volume a superb reference. But mostly I enjoyed reading Toibin's prose, full of elegance and grace, as he finds the common threads in both of their lives.

[Eric Sutton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this little gem of a book because I love Toibin's honest, forthright prose. He does especially well in this context, however. He's not writing straightforward biography; rather, the episodes of Bishop's life that occasioned her best poetry weave fluidly with Toibin's own upbringing and career as a young writer. At times, Toibin acts as poetic critic, explicating lines to drive a thesis, but never is the writing too dry and dusty. He draws from her whole oeuvre to advance his various themes, a technique that acts more as an homage to an influence, not a seminar lecture. I learned a lot about both Bishop and Toibin, but reading this unorthodox blend of personal narrative, biographical study, literary critique, and reader response was the true pleasure.

[Sylvia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked this book a lot. I think I've never had a good class on poetry. This opened my eyes in many ways, and learned about Bishop, Lowell and some of their peers. I'm certain that I will reread this again, and I will definitely read some of Toibin soon - The Master, and Norah Webster soon. Many friends have recommended him to me, but I just haven't gotten to him yet.

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the mid-1990s there was a bookshop in Melbourne called Collected Works. It must have been in the Nicholson Building. I had them order Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit for me. The guy who owned the place thought that amusing enough that he ordered two copies, so there would also be one on the shelves. I was young and angry and confident – but the Phenomenology defeated me – 100 pages in and I was as lost by a book as I’d ever been or would ever be again.

I would hover beside the bookshelves and the bookshop had endless poetry. I’d recently seen a documentary featuring poetry by Elizabeth Bishop, but they can’t have had many photos of her in the damn thing, as I turned to the guy who owned the place and said, “Jesus, did she really look like this?” She was looking to the right in the photograph and so young and so pretty. He said something like, “I know, right” – although, not that, as that would have been a decade or more too soon. The photo isn’t the one I can find on Google Images. Or perhaps memory has changed the photo in my mind so that the photograph I remember no longer exists anywhere, not even really any longer in my imagination.

In my review of Tóibín’s ‘New Ways to Kill Your Mother’ I ended by speculating on the unknown problematic relationship he must have had with his parents that made him such an exceptional writer. And our jokes will find us out. In this he talks about his father’s brain cancer and his father’s absence. He talks of the cruelty of his own stutter – something I must have known about before, but had forgotten. How he has to pause, and concentrate on his breathing, before he can land the hard K sound at the start of his own name. And immediately I thought of my favourite line of my favourite Irish song, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, and its clay cold corpse and how that stops my breath too, if for utterly different reasons.

My knowledge of Bishop’s poetry prior to this was mostly her most famous one. The Fish. I think I’d read it, haltingly, as my poor reading allows, to my children when they were quite young – perhaps too young to remember. I’ve always intended to learn more of this beautiful woman’s poetry – but I’ve always intended to do so many things and, like Hegel, I feared she would be beyond my powers. Now reading her has become urgent. I am much more familiar with her best friend, Robert Lowell. The man who can drop the names of relatives into his poems and the poem swells with American history. There are whole poems of his I know more or less by heart – only teaching on Tuesdays and even bits of Skunk Hour, which I don’t even think I knew was dedicated to Bishop.

Tóibín plays with the poems here. Reading this book you will learn what it is to read a poem like a poet reads a poem. The obsession with how words sound, why you might choose to nearly rhyme, rather than simply rhyme. Why some words have connotations that are too much or not enough for certain poems. Why simple observation and description, if done properly, are more haunting and tragic than blurting out how you feel. And how blurting out what you feel can sometimes work in ways that showing, rather than telling can’t. The rules are rules for us mere mortals – the gods play by other laws we can barely trace.

For years I had a correspondence that matched that between Bishop and Lowell, and also with a poet. But my poet showed me I would never really be a poet. I didn’t have the eye or the ear or the curiosity to sustain poeting. I’m better at prose – I feel less self-aware in prose. Poetry turns me into a prat. I don’t like the sound of myself with that voice, it will never be mine, not properly mine. And I lose count and I get too excited when I learn something new.

A woman at work and I are reading various books by Tóibín at almost the same time. She is recovering from a respiratory infection and I’m slowly climbing back out of Covid. My world is a haze of sleep and deeply strange dreams. Last night an ex-lover came to me, having wrapped herself in black lingerie and lay beside me. I suddenly realised to my horror that she intended herself as a present to me, and for me to unwrap her as a kind of gift – I woke with a start saying no, god, no. Her nakedness would have taken more from me than it might have given in return. Today I wrote to the woman at work urging her to read this book. I said on Facebook: whatever it takes, get hold of Colm Tóibín's On Elizabeth Bishop. Broken glass, icy winds, frightening angry men - face them all down and read this book.
And I've just finished New Ways to Kill Your Mother - you need to read that too, I'm afraid.

And both are true – and they apply to you too.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. Had just finished a novel by Colm Tóibín which I had mixed feelings about, The Story of the Night. This book about Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, as well as Robert Lowell and Gunn, was such a beautiful close reading of Bishop's poetry and her habit of close looking at the world. Her writing isn't flashy, it's measured, almost distance, as though it is the thing or place itself she wants to capture, not the effect on the observer. I've been reading a book of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry at the same time, and I see more now than I did on earlier readings of her work. What a treasure this small book is...It not only opened my eyes to Bishop's gifts, but also helped me to understand Tóibín's novels, because he studied Bishop in order to get some of that close observation of the places and people into his novels. Utter pleasure.

[Robert Reinhard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I once heard Elizabeth Bishop give a reading. I was too young and ignorant then to appreciate how special an occasion that was. Colm Toibin's close and perceptive line and poem readings and connections to other poets - especially his linking her work to Thom Gunn - add a great deal to the understanding of Bishop's place in the poetic tradition and her exact craftsmanship. His writing style is clear and without any vanity, just the sharp knowledge that one artist can bring to bear on the work of another because he shares the talent of how to use words. I disagree with a few of his critical remarks but on the whole a reader will learn a lot from this book. I'm sure it's a deliberate omission but an index would have been useful - for me anyway - at the end. I wonder why he didn't turn his attention to the poem Visits to St. Elizabeth and the thoughts of Ezra Pound.

[Sorayya Khan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not pick up this book because of Elizabeth Bishop's work, but because Colm Toibin always amazes with his writing and who doesn't want to better understand what influences a writer? He has written a moving meditation on how her work influenced his relationship to language in his work as a novelist. I learned as much about his writing as hers, but he has given me a frame to go back and study her work, something I would not be inclined to do otherwise. I was most struck by how pulled in I was, neither a student of poetry nor Bishop--yet the narrative pulled me along in its focus on place.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I greatly enjoy Bishop's poetry, I'm often puzzled by it and I have a hard time accounting for either what pleases or confuses me. Tóibín's engagement here, whether he is considering Bishop in the context of her contemporaries and mentors, in light of her letters or biography, or through careful consideration of the technical aspects of her writing, is a nearly perfect invitation to a fuller understanding of this great poet. Time and again it sent me back to the poems themselves and I was paid back with deeper insight into this enigmatic poet.

[Jane Fudger · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was an exploration of the poems of Elizabeth Bishop. It focuses on the power of the unsaid and restrictions that was ythe essence of her poetry. Prior to reading this book I was aware of Elizabeth Bishop but had not encountered any of her poetry -as a conseuence of this book I will invest in a copy of her work.
Toibin intertwines his work and travels with that of Elizabeth Bishop a commenting on how her work has affected his life. It is sensitively written and a good literary appreciation.

[Noah · Rating 4 out of 5]

An insightful introduction to Bishop's poetry, although he makes some fairly odd digressions at various points when he could dive deeper into Bishop's biography and poetry. I wish he would have spent more time unpacking particular poems. And I noticed that sometimes his decisions about what to quote did not match well with his commentary. That would be confusing for individuals less familiar with Bishop's poetry.

[Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

As always, Tóibín’s language is beautiful and evocative and I particularly love reading him write about writers since he has wonderful insights as both a writer himself and a lifelong, thoughtful reader.

I only wish I had a complete Bishop with me as I read this, because I wish I had the full text of the poems referenced. I’m sure it’s a copyright issue, so this is really more my problem than the book’s.

[David Given Schwarm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting read. Lots of stuff on Bishop. Lots of reflection on her work in context or conversation with other poets' work. A lot of Colm. A lot of judgment and not much appreciation. I do not know who this book is written for, but it is a good book about books--a reflection on the value of poetry, which I immensely enjoyed.

[Joann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Toibin does a fine job of enlightening the reader about many aspects of Bishop’s writing, using examples of not only Bishop’s works but that of others for clarification. Ultimately, the book contained much more information than I was interested in at this time though I appreciated learning about Bishop’s life.

[Melville Proust · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a little slow getting into the groove of this book, as I didn’t know Bishop’s work much at all. But now I want to know more. Toibin’s initial focus is mostly technical, but gradually he reveals the emotion behind the work, and discreetly brings forward its relevance to him in particular. The notion of emotion revealed via restraint, or even repression, is particularly satisfying.

[Kate Parr · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is both a tough and a beautiful read, with whole paragraphs where I'm just going with the flow without really knowing what's going on, and then a single phrase will have me putting the book down, out of breath. It even inspired me to write my own poetry, at which I'm sure they'd both be horrified!

[Dennis Fischman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The perfect marriage of author and subject is this book of essays by Colm Toibin on Elizabeth Bishop. He makes me want to read all of her poems I’ve never read, and grieve for someone I’d never want to meet.

[Johnpm · Rating 5 out of 5]

I only discovered this poet, (I know) wanting to learn more about her and her life I was thrilled to discover a book written by the brilliant Colm Tóibín about her. It's short (200 pages) and written as concise and as beautifully as one of Elizabeth Bishop's poems.

[Dayla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love her poetry!

[Kevin S · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not a biography exactly, nor a piece of criticism. Toibin is masterful.

[MaryJo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t remember why I purchased the The Complete Poems by Elisabeth Bishop in the Seminary Coop Bookstore, sometime in the early 19080s. Was there a poem in the New Yorker that compelled me or was it just a random choice? Specific Bishop poems have caught my attention over the years, and I started paying attention to mentions of her in things I came across; her flight to Brazil and her relationship with the architect, Lota, there; her friendship with other poets, Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore, her ties to the North Atlantic coast. I appreciate her understated poems and precise descriptions. When I saw this book on Audible, by Colm Toibin, I was curious about what he would say about Bishop and her poems. Toibin focuses on the poems, and I found myself listening to him with my copy of her book nearby. But he is also insightful about the connections between her life and her poems, and he is informative about the poetry world she inhabits. I especially appreciated the way that he treats her as a gay poet-- She did not like the “confessional” women poets of her era like Sexton and Path, yet her work was as certainly shaped by her life experiences, especially the death of her father when she was a baby and the mental illness and institutionalization of her mother when she was a child, as well as her sexual partners. Toibin is discreet without ignoring these factors. One of my favorite chapters, towards the end of the book was a comparison of Bishop with the poet, Thom Gunn, the English poet who wrote about gay culture in San Francisco. Toibin starts with their evaluations of each other as poets, and but weaves in commentary about how each dealt with losses of parents and loved ones, as well as their common status as gay poets. Although I was not previously familiar with Gunn, I liked how the comparison allowed Toibin to say things about Bishop that he might have not been a discussed otherwise. There is also a beautiful comparison of Bishop and Joyce, and their writings about lost homelands, for Joyce Ireland, and for Bishop, Nova Scotia. Both Joyce and Bishop missed the light of these northern landscapes. Both of these chapters show how the book is a "personal" read for Toibin--his own history reflected through his choices of comparisons, rather than through narrations of his own experiences. Throughout the book, Toibin puts the poetry first, and at the same time offers a remarkable picture of the person who created it. In the end, I found the book deeply satisfying.

[Nicola Pierce · Rating 5 out of 5]

I saw this in a Sligo bookshop and was immediately attracted to its neatness, a slim, novel-sized hardback. I knew little about poetry, Colm Toibin or Emily Bishop and this was a beautifully written introduction to all three. I should have gotten a book of Bishop's poetry to have by my side and did feel ashamed for reading Toibin's dissection of poems I had never read. I want to get Megan Marshall's biography of Bishop as I'm eager to learn more about her. This little edition for Princeton University Press is like dipping a toe in the water, it leaves you wanting to know more. I'm fairly sure I'll re-read it once I buy Bishop's poetry. As a writer I was filled with envy at Colm Toibin having a friend who could lend him a house in Novia Scotia where he was free to be completely absorbed in his work. Lucky so and so!