God and Elizabeth Bishop

CHERYL WALKER is the Richard Armour Professor of Modern Languages at Scripps College, USA and the author of a book on nineteenth-century Native American literature (Indian Nation) and several books on American women poets, including The Nightingale's Burden: Women Poets and American Culture Before 1900 (winner of a Choice Award for 1983) and Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets.

• Time and Eternity The Fall Love and Longing Suffering Meaning Blessed Are the Poor Assent

"By exploring with such lucidity and grace the 'undercurrent of religious musings in Bishop s professed skepticism,' Cheryl Walker has created an important new perspective on the life and art of Elizabeth Bishop. Walker s reading is in no sense dogmatic. Rather it is exploratory, and, in her own words 'playful' in its nuanced reading of Bishop s ambivalent relationship with God and the otherworldly. Walker discovers in Bishop 'a writer who ends up with the questions rather than the answers of a person with a religious temperament,' and her well informed and insightful reading of that writer suggests the possibility of a new and welcome mode of religious criticism for the twenty-first century." - Thomas Travisano, Hartwick College