Annelle 's review
The Collected Prose
by Elizabeth Bishop
Annelle 's review
The Collected Prose by Elizabeth Bishop
Annelle 's review
rating:
I didn't have time to finish this book, since I am leaving the house where it is from. I first read this collection about a dozen years ago, but only remembered when I got to "Efforts of Affection," the story of Bishop's friendship with Marianne Moore. When I reread it, I saw that this story has somehow been operating on me since age twenty. This house's library also contains Bishop's collected letters, _One Art_, which are fun to read in tandem with her prose. My favorite works in this collection are "The U.S.A. School of Writing" (1966), about her job as a "teacher" in a fly-by-night correspondence school in New York; the aforementioned "Efforts of Affection" (c.1969); and, inevitably, a story from her childhood in Nova Scotia, "In the Village" (1953), whose core is burning in the blacksmith's shop.
