As the first book-length collection to focus on Elizabeth Bishop, this book has become an essential resource on this poet--now recognised as one of America's greatest artists--whose poetry, as Harold Bloom says in his foreword, stands at the edge where what is most worth saying is all but impossible to say. The volume includes major essays by David Kalstone, Helen Vendler, and Robert Pinsky, among others; a chronology of short articles and reviews, poems, memoirs, and memorials, many by major poets (among them Bishop's three most notable supporters--Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, and Randall Jarrell); and an illuminating selection of work by Bishop herself, some of which is unavailable anywhere else.