Elizabeth Bishop Questions Of Mastery [Paperback]

Essential reading for anyone interested in Elizabeth Bishops life and art& Bishops struggle as an heir to modernism comes alive in Costellos precise prose.Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Masteryexplores the connection between the poets descriptive passion and her ecphrastic imagination. Costello is interested in&stratagems of design to which Bishop resorts in a desire for mastery over world and self& The connections Costello makes between modern art and modern poetry are valuable, imaginative, and licit.Costello traces Bishops progress toward her quite clear rejection of the magisterial claims of art in a series of dazzlingly close readings of the poems, including a handful that have rarely been discussed& I have been reading Bishop for ten years, and it seems to me that until I read Costellos explications of Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance, Roosters, and Pink Dog, I had not read them at all.A guide to Bishops poetry and an appreciation of her unique qualities as an observer. The generous quotations from letters, drafts, journals, and occasional prose sketches both deepen and confirm the analysis here, and make the result a work of criticism that has some of the suggestive power of biography.In this finely written companion to Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, Bonnie Costello gives a compelling use of Bishop and her ways of seeing and writing.