On Elizabeth Bishop

As good a novelist as Colm Toíbín is, he's also a perceptive and impossibly well-read critic, and his new little book in Princeton's Writers on Writers series is a wonderful window onto a writer he's felt a particular affinity with since he was in his teens. In a loose, approachable way, he illuminates her poems and reflects on their shared histories as exiles and gay writers and Bishop's connections with writers from Marianne Moore to Thom Gunn. And with sympathetic patience, he builds a sense of what it was like for Bishop—private, exact, reticent—to turn her lifetime of observation into the small but exquisite set of poems she published over fifty years.