Product Description
In 1952, soon after her arrival in Brazil, Elizabeth Bishop asked her new Brazilian friends which of their country's books she should read. They recommended Minha Vida de Menina - a diary kept by a young girl who lived in a mining town at the end of the nineteenth century. As a labor of love, Elizabeth Bishop devoted three years to translating the diary, a delightful account of a young girl's life in Brazil.
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Customer Reviews (3)

uplifting
This book is fresh an uplifting...such a witty, charming author. I picked this book up in Parati,Brazil and am thankful for it!

Great
Unpretentious, yet magically beautiful.
A young girl's diary of three years of her life in the end of the XIX century in a small diamond-extracting town in Brazil.
Not meant for publication, the author gathered her writings to organize a booklet for her grand-daughters. When she was convinced to publish it, she could never dream it would turn out to be translated into many other languages.
A must for literature lovers.

Charming, insightful, and humorous; life thru a child's eyes
Diary of a girl in rural Brazil in the late 1890's; now translated into English, the book has a charm of its own that transcends time and place. Diary entries are short, so the book can be read in bits and pieces. But should not be missed by anyone who loves life and the often acerbic observations of a child. Sadly, the original in Portuguese is no longer in print in either Brazil or Portugal, but the English version lives on. Don't miss it. ... Read more

Product Description
Many readers are struck by Elizabeth Bishop's use of clear, striking descriptions of the physical world, and no scholar has ever asked how Bishop's commitment to description shapes her writing and thinking. "Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Description" argues that attention to the material realm informs everything Bishop does. Seen through this lens, many familiar topics look remarkably different. Bishop's relationship to travel, epiphany, surrealism, and imagery are all transformed, and a timely new Bishop emerges - one quite different from the postmodern poet that has dominated recent scholarship. Zachariah Pickard eschews academic jargon and concentrates on the poems themselves as well as a number of key prose passages that have long been overlooked. His study combines scholarly rigor with clarity and common sense to present a moving new account of Bishop's work that will appeal to educated readers within and without the academy. ... Read more

Product Description
Exploring the connections between nature and culture, this volume discusses the works of three female American poets: Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), and Amy Clampitt (1920-1994).

Though only Bradstreet was born outside North America, each poet is shown to grapple with the ways that European civilization was transformed on the new continent. The author's analysis highlights the interconnected themes of travel, geography, cartography and wildness. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Opening the Doors of Perception
This book is an outstanding analysis of "reading and writing nature" in the works of four great American poets.I found the book specific and compelling. It helped clarify for me the problems of perception and cognition as they have been analyzed, written about and lived by American poets.It enhanced my own experience of and appreciation for these writers.The book also opens a door onto the larger dimensions of nature that can become locked or occluded through disuse. I recommend this book for anyone who is interested in the relationship between art, nature and the imagination. ... Read more

Product Description
Just as the cultural background of readers shapes how they respond to texts, the context in which writers live shapes what they write. This book explores the relationship between three prominent twentieth-century American white women poets and the manifestations of whiteness in their works. The book argues that white women who write do so from within ideological, social, economic, political, and psychological frameworks of whiteness. Each chapter places one poet in relation to historical and cultural racial events prevalent during the time of her writings and explores the particular poems created and published during that period. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An Illuminating and Surprising Study
Renée Curry's White Women Writing White is an admirably well researched,independent, brave, and often brilliant and startling book. It willundoubtedly prove germinal (and controversial) in critical whitenessstudies. It provides an absolutely new perspective on the poets HildaDoolittle (H. D.), Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath. It draws attention,truly for the first time, to the racial signifiers in the texts of thesethree great poets. It treats whiteness as a marked characteristic in thesame way as blackness and Asianness have traditionally functioned inmainstream American literature and culture. It repeatedly and convincinglylocates racial meanings in passages that have never been read in that lightbefore. This book transforms the landscape. It is the most significant newwork on these poets in years. ... Read more

Product Description
A commentary and history of Amish quilts, with 138 full-color photographs of Amish quilt designs, plus 18 additional black and white illustrations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Beautiful, inspirationalphotographs
I first acquired this book about 30 years ago and lost it somewhere along the way.What a joy to have it back!The color photographs are beautiful and most show the intricacy of quilting designs and stitches. Some of the colors in the photographs are so vivid that the stitching is hard to see.

This is an excellent book for anyone who wants to know the history and development of Amish quilts.The 25 page introduction gives us historic background on the Amish community and explains how the Amish faith is incorporated into all facets of daily life.A subsection of text, "Geographical and Chronological Evolutions of the Amish Quilts," describes why specific communities use, or don't use, certain colors and quilt designs.

The remaining 70 pages are devoted to color photographs, usually with a minimum of two and up to five quilts over a two page spread. In writing the captions, the authors occasionally refer back to information from the introductory text to remind the reader of what is being seen -why the embroidery, why the use of different tones of color, how the quilting pattern was designed, etc.The captions also describe the fabric used and name of quilt design style, as well as an approximate date the quilt was made.This is a beautiful book.

Background of Quilts
This book provides the reader with what I feel is an indepth look at the designs used by the Amish.The spritual origins of not only the quilting but the piecing is fasinating.For any one interested in the history of Amish quilting and the influence their relgion has played in developing their quilts this is a must have book.

A Gallery of Amish Quilts
The fascination with American quilts continues.Of special interest to many collectors today are the boldly colored, handsomeely quilted bedcovers made by the Amish women in Pennsylvania - particularyly Lancaster County - and in the Amish communities of Ohio and Indiana.

These old Amish quilts have a dual appeal - their visual impact and their superior craftsmanship.Some students of modern art are drawn to them because their abstract geometric designs are strikingly parallel to the paintings of several contemporary artists.Other collectors treasure these quilts for their intricate, refined handiwork and their minute stitches.What is amazing, and worth exploring in this handsome book, is how the Amish women, with a limited range of materials and with limited exposure to the tastes and patterns of the "outside" world, have created enduring works of art that are visually exciting and sophisticated.

A Gallery of Amish Quilts presents for the study and enjoyment of all 150 Amish quilts in color, together with splendid balack and white photographs of the Amish people and countryside.Also, a comprehensive introduction gives the cultural and aesthetic background for the fuller enjoyment of these beautiful quilts.

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Product Description
This book examines the response of twentieth-century American poetry to the proliferation of technical and visual media. It treats the modern poet's problem of how to accommodate a cultural focus on photo-realism and technologically enhanced vision in a verbal aesthetic medium that itself generates no actual images. Relying on references to material media in the poets' correspondence and biographies, as well as on tropes and visual semiotics in the poems, the project explores the paradoxical sensation of reality effects in language. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

planters lore
A must have book for people interested in the planting systems of old hawaii, plus an abundant amount of info on the history of these lands and people, overall one of the best books Ive discovered on this subject..

Native Planters
4 stars because only God gets 5 stars. This is the quintessential reference for native Hawaiian history, ethnobotany, culture, language, and lifestyle.It doesn't just cover what is what.It covers the who, what, when, where, why, and how.The depth of the coverage goes all the way to the migration routes.Unfortunately, a hard-back edition was never made.The book is worth every penny and is guaranteed to go up in value - CK ... Read more

Product Description
"One of the most promising young poet-critics in America" (Los Angeles Times) examines a revolutionary generation of poets.

Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Delmore Schwartz formed one of the great constellations of talent in American literature. In the decades after World War II, they changed American poetry forever by putting themselves at risk in their poems in a new and provocative way. Their daring work helped to inspire the popular style of poetry now known as "confessional." But partly as a result of their openness, they have become better known for their tumultuous lives—afflicted by mental illness, alcoholism, and suicide—than for their work. This book reclaims their achievement by offering critical "biographies of the poetry"—tracing the development of each poet's work, exploring their major themes and techniques, and examining how they transformed life into art.

An ideal introduction for readers coming to these major American poets for the first time, it will also help veteran readers to appreciate their work in a new light. 6 illustrations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

The Surgeon's Gift: Inspiration and Clarity
Adam Kirsch takes his title "The Wounded Surgeon" from T. S. Eliot's poem "East Coker":

"The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part."

In his introduction, Kirsch explains: "T.S. image evokes the resolve, not to say heroism, that these poets displayed by submitting their most intimate and painful experiences to the objective discipline of art. . . . But the suffering that afflicted this group of poets becomes significant only because they examined it with the surgeon's rigor, detachment, and skill" (p. xi).

Kirsch does the same--examines with "rigor, detachment and skill"--the body of these six poets' lives and works. His close readings deepen our understanding of how their lives and work intertwined, influenced, and yes, (as the subtitle says) transformed each other.

Lowell, Bishop, Berryman, Jarrell, Schwartz, and Plath never had a better reader--certainly not in one place. Each chapter illumines the other as Kirsch patiently explores his thesis and shows the rise and (and in the case of Schwartz) the fall of their talents.

Kirch shows their education and work in the context of the literary movements of the time--modernism and The New Criticism. These six poets scrambled a path through Moderism to a new form of poetic expression that would stamp itself on generations of poets to come. This new way of writing allowed the breath and messiness of life to come inside the poem, not be held aloof and at bay outside.

Personally, I especially enjoyed his chapter on Elizabeth Bishop ("Everything only connected by 'and'and 'and'") as Kirch elucidates Bishop's search to "contain loss in art, the scream in the clang." I came away with a profound appreciation of Bishop ascraftsperson (maker), poet, person, and woman...and, can now take these insights back to reading her work.

I also found inspiration and greater clarity for my own work from reading this book. What greater gift can a writer ask?

--Janet Grace Riehl,Sightlines: A Poet's Diary

This Derivative Book is Less than Groundbreaking
Anyone who has read the scholarship on these poets knows that there is really nothing original here.Either Kirsch has not done his homework, or, more likely, he has assimilated much of the relevant schoalrship without acknowedging it in this sparsely documented book.I was excited about this book because I thought it would bea good introduction to some good poets for the general reader.It may well be I'm not the audience for this book, but I noticed that most of the insights had been expressed before by others and more convincingly.This is middle-of-the-road, indeed middling, literary journalism.Kirsch's claims are modest, but he is not--he reinvents the wheel and passes it off as his own singular wisdom at his best and as the wisdom of the ages at his worst.

Not a poet or critic
I have little to no experience with poetry criticism and little appreciation for modern poetry. I was hoping this book would provide me with some education so I could appreciate poetry to a greater extent. Well, it did that and more. I found the book very interesting. Although a "dense" read (I read many sections more than once to understand them), I found it worth my time. I came away with an understanding of these poets and how to read their, and others', poetry. I found the analyses to be straightforward and not full of a lot of insider jargon. Although I have no sense of how much the author's comments are revisionist, repetitive of prior work, or new; I found them to be well-substantiated and supported by some wonderful examples of poems.

Poetic Purging
Adam Kirsch has written an interesting 'surgical procedure' in the THE WOUNDED SURGEON: he defends the so-called 'Confessional Poets' Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Delmore Schwartz whose work from 1940 through the 1970s, praising "the resolve, not to say heroism, that these poets displayed by submitting their most intimate and painful experiences to the objective discipline of art."

In clear and at all times illuminating prose Kirsch examines each of these six poets and relates the personal lives that influenced their major works.Not a gossip column this, but an erudite exploration of how pain and death and disappointment and tragedy of all manner drove these poets to validate their own sorrows and rage rather that imagining those feelings or assigning them to fictitious personages.

While most everyone knows the life and times and resulting poetry of Sylvia Plath (endless biographies and films have seen to that), few of the others' lives are understood. Kirsch sets the record straight and in doing so makes lucid some of the more obtuse works included in this book.

Some would argue that Kirsch's thesis goes on too long, but in getting into the minds and hearts of poets can be a lengthy process. Kirsch has done a fine job of study on these six poets and lets us see how their art transformed their lives by their confessional poetry. Grady Harp, June 05 ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Interesting background on a minor writer
John Peale Bishop was a minor poet and author of the 1920s and 1930s.He knew Fitzgerald and met Hemingway, but didn't make that much of an impact himself.This biography gives you a view of the world of the time and some sense of what it was like to live then and try to make a living by writing.

The real interest for me is that John Bishop was my grandfather.I was named after him.Since he died young, I never met him.There weren't many family stories, either.This book thus has a special value to me that it probably won't to others.
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Product Description
Imperialism on Trial reveals, across a broad cross-section of geographical and political settings, the operation of the complicated and often conflicted dynamic between the national and international dimensions of colonialism in its final and most historically consequential phase. ... Read more

Product Description
`They are Not Art -- NOT AT ALL,' Elizabeth Bishop insists. Forty of her pictures are here tracked down and reproduced in full colour by poet and art writer William Benton, who provides an introduction and an anthology of Miss Bishop's formal and informal prose on the subject of art and artists. `If Elizabeth Bishop wrote like a painter,' Benton says, `she painted like a writer. All her paintings are small, on sheets of paper the same size that one might write a poem on.' The earliest dates from 1937, the last from the year before her death. Most are gouaches and water-colours. It was not until 1993 that they were gathered (after sleuthing in archives and among her friends) and exhibited at the East Martello Tower Museum, in Key West where she had lived between 1938 and 1948. This was the first time the world at large knew her as a painter, but it might have guessed at her skills from the poems with their painterly eye and subtle tonalities.Her vivid gallery poem `Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance' comes to mind as readers encounter Miss Bishop's quiet scenes of New York, Newfoundland, Florida, Yucatan, Brazil, her occasional portraits and still lives, vital and mysterious as the poems, but their reality unrehearsed and not correctable.Amazon.com Review
ElizabethBishop was a great poet. It turns out that she was also a rather goodpainter, even though she insisted that her paintings were anything but art.Her visual creations offer intimate and unexpected insights into the magic offamiliar places and beloved friends. Exchanging Hats provides bothveteran Bishop admirers and those meeting her for the first time with anextraordinary examination of her paintings and drawings. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

expensive little rarity
I can understand why Elizabeth Bishop claimed not to be an artist, so why then, was this published.The visual ability of some writers is well known, but not back then, maybe.Also some artists and poets are prose all the way.
This was purchased for a research project.Historical overview mainly.

A Poet's Paintings
Elizabeth Bishop was an elusive and multi-faceted woman. Gaining a glimpseof her through her poetry, some details through her prose, she has remainedenigmatic, despite the many volumes of criticism and biography dedicated toher life and art. Her paintings show us another side of her creativity, andin "Exchanging Hats" we are provided with a greater depth ofunderstanding of her creative abilities. The paintings themselves, spareand pragmatic, are as geographical and domestic as her poetry. More subtlethan they first appear,they illuminate her life from a differentperspective. For anyone interested in Bishop,this book is essential. ... Read more