(1911 – 1979) Poet and translator of two places (“here” and “elsewhere”) and two directions (south, at first Key West, Brazil; then north—Nova Scotia, Harvard, Maine), Bishop inhabited each gratefully without longing. Things ordinary (a typewriter, four quarts of motor oil) and extraordinary (an enormous fish, a moose, a dog so closely shaved it’s “pink”) in her verse, prose poems and short fiction challenge fresh perceptions.

Distant friend (of poets Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell), committed formalist and expatriate lesbian, Bishop’s necessary correspondence distills the self her “one art” required her to lose.