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Article: Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It.
- Article from:
- The Nation
- Article date:
- April 19, 1993
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1993 The Nation Company L.P. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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With Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, Brett Millier has written a biography of a poet little suited to the current Oprah-era mania for harnessing one or two "sordid secrets" to explain a poetic oeuvre. What in the hands of a less skillful biographer might have been mere scandal-sheet copy - Bishop's lesbianism, alcoholism and tortured relationships, which at times ended in someone turning mad before her eyes - here are matter-of-factly and delicately handled. Delicate in the sense John Ashbery uses it about Bishop, "not in the sense of softness or suavity but in the sense of a rigorously conceived mathematical instrument." Millier's sound and subtle biography ...