Elizabeth Bishop is one of America's finest, most technically accomplished, and sensual poets, and it is hard to understand why her reputation is not higher on this side of the Atlantic. She was born in New England in 1911. Her father died when she was still a babe in arms, and her mother was committed to a mental asylum when Elizabeth was five; Elizabeth never saw her again, and was brought up by her grandparents. She attended Vassar, where she made friends with Mary McCarthy and her fellow poet, Marianne Moore; later too she became a close friend of Robert Lowell, to whom some of the most fascinating letters in this volume are addressed - and not all of which are "literary"; one of them begins: "Speaking of piles (wouldn't that be a good opening phrase to use for a creative writing course?)". Lowell and she were an oddly assorted pair, but they had deep respect and regard for each other, both as people and as poets. Elizabeth had begun to write, both in prose and verse, at Vassar; her first book, the luminously beautiful North and South, was published in 1946. In 1951 she settled, inspirationally, in Brazil with her lover, Lota de Macedo Soares, after whose death in the late Sixties Bishop returned to the US and taught at Harvard and other colleges. She died of a stroke in 1979. This big, handsome volume of her letters is wonderful value, even at £14. I can do no better than quote Tom Paulin's commendation from the jacket: ". . . an historic event, a bit like discovering a new planet or watching a bustling continent emerge, glossy and triumphant, from the blank ocean". Not to be missed by anyone interested in American letters, in poetry, or the life of the mind.