“Will you join me,” the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Bishop asked a close friend, “in wading in the mud of the celestial gardens?” Modern literary biographers don’t always indulge in muckraking, but they do tend to focus on earthy as well as ethereal matters; no doubt they feel that, as the character Riverman from one of Bishop’s poems puts it, “everything must be there / in that magic mud.” Still, one of the many strengths of Thomas Travisano’s
Lively, insightful, helpful review of the new Bishop biography. Thanks very much for posting it.
Mighty fine.