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Emily Raboteau
A New Environmental Canon

New books by Camille Dungy and Elizabeth Rush argue that the ethics of care we often associate with maternity is crucial in combating issues as large as the climate crisis.

Jenny Uglow
In Search of the Rare and Strange

In Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece, Ulinka Rublack traces the global connections of the merchants who were the creative agents of the European art market in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Ben Ratliff
Not Not Jazz

When Miles Davis went electric in the late 1960s, he overhauled his thinking about songs, genres, and what it meant to lead a band.

David S. Reynolds
‘A Fiendish Fascination’

The representation of Jews in antebellum popular culture reveals that Americans found them both cartoonishly villainous and enticingly exotic.

Free from the Archives

Elizabeth Bishop was born 113 years ago today. “One of the great artists of the twentieth century,” wrote April Bernard in the Review’s March 24, 2011, issue, “her poems now tower over the landscape alongside those of Eliot and Stevens.” “Elizabeth Bishop is the cat curiosity did not kill,” Robert Mazzocco enthused in October 1967. And in April 2006 Charles Simic applauded: “What stands out in Bishop’s poems is her magic realism, her light touch, and her extraordinary formal mastery. The ordinary and the fabulous coexist easily in them.”

Bishop, who died in 1979, was also a contributor to The New York Review, where she eulogized Flannery O’Connor, signed two open letters, translated a poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, upbraided Stephen Spender for attributing to her work that was written by John Berryman, and, of course, published—in our April 2, 1964, issue—a poem: “Twelfth Morning; Or What You Will.”

Elizabeth Bishop
Twelfth Morning; Or What You Will

Like a first coat of whitewash
when it’s wet,
the thin gray mist lets everything
show through:
the black boy Balthazár, a fence, a horse,
a foundered house,

—cement and rafters sticking from a dune.
(The Company passes off these white
but shopworn
dunes as lawns.) “Shipwreck,”
we say; perhaps
this is a housewreck….

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