A finely textured portrait of an acclaimed poet.
How her life informed the beloved poetry of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979).
Travisano (Emeritus, English/Hartwick Coll.; Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman, and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic, 1999, etc.), founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society, draws judiciously on Bishop’s poems, prose, and letters—including those to her psychoanalyst, many lovers, and close friends—to create an authoritative and sensitive biography. Bishop carried lifelong scars from a difficult childhood: Her father died when she was an infant; her mother was sequestered in a mental institution from the time Elizabeth was 5. Passed among relatives in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts, Bishop was told nothing about her mother—and never saw her again. Besides abiding loneliness and feelings of abandonment, Bishop suffered from asthma and bouts of eczema. In adulthood, she also succumbed to autoimmune disorders; depression, made worse by cortisone prescribed for her asthma; and alcoholism. Travisano suggests that heredity may have played a part in Bishop’s alcohol abuse, which sometimes occurred for no apparent reason. Often, she became a binge drinker in response to emotional distress. Since she repeatedly attached herself to women who were possessive, headstrong, or mentally unstable, her love affairs could be volatile. Travisano finds sources of Bishop’s poetry in those difficult relationships and in enduring wounds as well as in various settings of her peripatetic life: among them, New York, where Marianne Moore became a mentor to whom, for several years, she would submit poems for approval; Key West, where Hemingway’s ex-wife Pauline Pfeiffer became a close friend; Brazil, where Bishop lived for nearly two decades with the wealthy journalist and arts patron Lota de Macedo Soares; San Francisco; Seattle; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Maine. Although not groundbreaking, Travisano’s sympathetic perspective, thorough research, and perceptive close readings lucidly portray the complexities of a writer noted for her “reserve, calm, meticulous accuracy, and humorous detachment.”
A finely textured portrait of an acclaimed poet.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-42881-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
