Faber & Faber

Words in Air: Edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton

• £40.00 (Hardback)
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Synopsis:

When first introduced to Robert Lowell in 1947, Elizabeth Bishop wrote that 'he was living in a basement room on Third Avenue ... and was rather untidy. He was wearing a rumpled dark blue suit; I remember the sad state of his shoes; he needed a haircut ... I took to him at once.' Lowell was equally taken by Bishop, and thought she had 'more to offer, I think, than anyone writing poems in English'.

The candid, affectionate, constrained and loving friendship of two American poets is recorded in letters written over three decades, collected here for the first time in their entirety. It begins after the publication of their first books, when they were 'as mischievous as children about the figures they held most in awe' (David Kalstone), and ends only with Lowell’s death.

Their discussions of books, articles and the literary scene; their agreements and disagreements about T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Mary McCarthy, William Empson and other writers; their arguments about each other’s work; and their observations of Brazilian and American political life are set alongside Bishop’s descriptions of her years with her lover on a mountainside near Rio, her wit and keen attention turning equally to soldiers and politicians, architectural projects and toucans in rainstorms; and Lowell’s sketches of his family life in New York, London, Maine and Boston, with an eye for physical and emotional detail that seems directly wired into his prose.

The letters also record the complications of each other’s lives - Lowell’s mental illness, Bishop’s struggles with alcohol, their mutually crossed love affairs. In their now celebrated correspondences, they performed best for one another, as the drama of their public and private lives unfolded. Absorbing, beautifully written and brilliant, this major epistolary friendship reads like a novel.

Tags:

Categorised as:

Non-fiction

Sub-categories:

Biography & Memoir; Essays & Prose

People & Characters:

Elizabeth Bishop; Robert Lowell

Genres & Themes:

American Poets; Criticism; Letters; Writers