SOURCE: Spires, Elizabeth. “One Life, One Art: Elizabeth Bishop in Her Letters.” New Criterion 12, no. 9 (May 1994): 18-23.

In the following essay, Spires reviews One Art: Letters, finding the volume a “magnificent” addition to Bishop's canon.

If an unknown poet were to be offered a sort of cosmic bargain where he or she would live the life Elizabeth Bishop lived in return for the poems she wrote, I doubt there would be many takers. From infancy on, Bishop suffered some of the worst losses imaginable. Her father, a prosperous builder from a wealthy New England family, died in 1911 when she was eight months old. Her Canadian mother then suffered a series of nervous breakdowns that led to her permanent institutionalization in an asylum in Halifax when Elizabeth was five; Bishop never saw her again. Cared for first by her maternal grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia, a relatively secure...