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On Elizabeth Bishop
- Narrated by: John Keating
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged Audiobook
- Categories: Literature & Fiction, World Literature
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Summary
In this book novelist Colm Tóibín 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, Tóibín 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 listeners interested in both Bishop and Tóibín.
For Tóibín, the secret of Bishop's emotional power is in what she leaves unsaid. Exploring Bishop's famous attention to detail, Tóibín 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 Tóibín'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 Tóibín'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.
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What listeners say about On Elizabeth Bishop
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Andree Mitchell
- 05-12-18
Welcome to Brazil
I loved this. Stupidly thought it was read by Colm Toibin but who cares. No matter how repressed or not Elizabeth Bishop was. I suspect she would have been very frustrating in person. I found this inspirational and a lovely introduction to her poetry.
And did not feel like a complete idiot when getting to understand a bit more about the background to her poetry, her loves and life. She was flawed and lacked confidence, but also did not. So join the club.
1 person found this helpful
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- ColonelJames
- 05-06-18
Quite possibly the worst reading I have ever heard
John Keating makes this book impossible to listen to. I lasted two hours and could not do any more. There is a transparent self-regard in Keating's artificially lilting voice and in his decision to read everything as if it is his own poetry. The. Caesuras are just. Stupid. Elizabeth Bishop deserved better. Colm Tóibín deserved better. Any listener would deserve better. This recording should be destroyed. Shame on John Keating.
2 people found this helpful
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- Shipwrecked
- 24-06-17
Worthwhile
Toibin has a good balance of biography, literary criticism, and personal essay here. Engaging and informative, only dry if you don't enjoy reading about poetry. I felt the book got better as it went on, and very much liked the sections on Thom Gunn. The narrator does a great job as well. You don't have to know these poems by heart to enjoy. Would hope more literary biographies/essays are made available as audio books.
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- CHET YARBROUGH
- 19-05-16
ELIZABETH BISHOP
Colm Tóibín’s “On Elizabeth Bishop” is a brief outline of the life of a poet. It is a poet’s eye view of another’s life and work. For those not enamored with poetry, Colm Tóibín manages to encourage listeners to hear Bishop’s poetry.
Elizabeth Bishop begins life in hardship with the loss of her father when a baby and, as still a child, her mother to an asylum. Shunted from relative to relative with some stability from a grandmother and grandfather, Bishop completes high school and is accepted at Vassar College in 1929, just before the stock market crash. Listening to Tóibín’s analysis of Bishop’s poems, one understands why Bishop’s poetry is classified as cold, somewhat clinical, and only lightly emotional.
Tóibín’s analysis and Keating’s warm narration compel a listener who may have never heard a Bishop’ poem to hear one read. Several poems can be found on YouTube; one of which is “One Art”. Because of accompanying images in this production of the poem, the perfection, meaning, and depth of Bishop’s words are clear; even to the tone deaf.
Tóibín’s analysis of Bishop's poems offers a window through which one sees the value of poetry.
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- J. A.
- 01-12-15
Excellent when actually discussing Bishop
...but author spends too much time discussing his own life or even Gunn's work instead of directly taking on Bishop. I imagine that's because he's written about Gunn before. But the material concerning the personal aspect of his own life would serve the book better as introductory material rather than the focus of full blown chapters. The best parts of the book were the materials concerning Bishop's and Lowell's friendship.