Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
Starred Review. Bishop and Lowell were two of the major poets of postwar America. From the time they met in 1947 at a party thrown by their mutual friend and poet, Randall Jarrell, through the end of Lowell's life in 1977, the pair—who saw each other rarely but considered themselves intimate friends—maintained a steady correspondence about literature and their turbulent lives and their own complicated, at times flirtatious friendship. Lowell was manic-depressive and embroiled in two volatile marriages, while Bishop also suffered depression and more than her share of loss, including the suicide of her longtime lover. Many of their now famous letters, previously available in separate volumes, appear here in one volume, their exchanges preserved in the order they were sent and received. Throughout this momentous volume, transcendence comes to these two often troubled writers through the shared experience of art that brought them together and sustained them: If only one could see everything that way all the time!, writes Bishop in 1957, that rare feeling of control, illumination—lifeisall right, for the time being. 13 b&w photos.(Oct.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.