Another superb contribution in the Writers on Writers series from Princeton Press.  In this slim volume, the Irish author and poet, Toibin writes lovingly and discerningly about Elizabeth Bishop (b. 1911-d.1979) braiding his own experience with writing, living by the ocean, losing parents and family at an early age, being gay, and writing with that of Bishop.  She lost her father at 8 months and her mother to madness and incarceration at 5 years and was moved from her Nova Scotia home to Worcester.  Attending Vassar and the moving to Key West, Brazil, and finally settling in Boston, Toibin refers to her moving north and south along a single line of longitude, always near the sea and always searching for a precise, detailed, and ‘fierce simplicity (ala Hemingway) to describe nature and the world while hiding the emotion in between the words and lines.  Her epitaph reads:  “All the untidy activity continues/awful but cheerful.”  I loved the detail Toibin provided, especially the story about her buying a used MG with the proceeds when she sold one of her few prose pieces to TNY!  Toibin details her friendship with Thom Gunn, her complex and often turbulent relationships with Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore, and her love affairs with Lota Soares in Brazil and her American executor Alice Methfessel.   The winner of the 1955 Pulitzer Prize, Bishop left behind a small body of work, exquisite in its detail and beauty like a precious jewel.  Toibin’s final chapter about the disappearance of a section of the southwest Irish coast where he spent his childhood summers and which was preserved in an oil painting he saw in Dublin is beautiful.  He compares his feeling to Bishop’s “Poem”’s final lines which have the feeling that we know somewhere, or  we knew it, and it is “live” and “touching in detail”, is, as Bishop says, “the little that we get for free/the little of our earthly trust. Not much.”