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.

"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

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

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.

"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

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