Shifting Ground

Bonnie Costello, Professor of English at Boston University, is the general editor of The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore.

A study that is...remarkable... for its detailed knowledge, lucidity of thought, and, quite often, for the sheer skill with which its author develops ingenious arguments and interpretations. Costello draws considerably on Bishop’s unpublished writings: her letters, journals, and manuscripts. These have been used occasionally before by other critics. But nobody has exploited the rich mine of material available in this unpublished work with the persistence, the sheer consistency of purpose and discovery, that Costello shows throughout... This is a book that adds significantly to our appreciation of a poet in whose work truth slips in. as it were, through the cold particularities of perception and then slips quietly away again.

• 1. Introduction: Frame and Flux 2. Frost's Crossings 3. Stevens' Eccentricity 4. Moore's America 5. Amy Clampitt: Nomad Exquisite 6. A. R. Ammons: Pilgrim, Sage, Ordinary Man 7. John Ashbery: Landscapeople 8. Epilogue: "The Machine in the Garden" Notes Works Cited Acknowledgments Index