While living in Brazil, Bishop published her second volume of poetry, North and South—A Cold Spring, which won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize. Her third collection, Questions of Travel, came out nearly a decade later. Dedicated to Soares, the poems capture Bishop's experience living in Brazil, the abject poverty she witnessed against the lush and verdant landscape, and her struggle to learn the language and absorb the culture.

Though Bishop focuses her attention on complex issues, she often uses a small canvas to reflect a theme or a time period. As a traveler, she is more curious about the politics and customs of the town's local market than the national monuments. She investigates class through the microeconomics of a filling station. She explores her new surroundings with the same humor and insight she uses to revisit her childhood, and always manages to avoid the sentimental.

Bishop's time in Brazil represented some of the happiest years in her life. Still, her alcoholism and depression persisted and placed an enormous strain on her relationship with Soares.

When Soares began working to develop a park along the Flamengo Beach, Bishop became more despondent. The project was demanding and Soares came under a tremendous amount of pressure and criticism. In 1967, after years of struggle, Soares came to New York with Bishop and committed suicide.

Bishop tried to live in Brazil after Soares's death, but found it too difficult to manage, both logistically and emotionally. She returned to the States and started teaching and giving readings. While serving as poet-in-residence at Harvard University, Bishop met and fell in love with Alice Methfessel. Her last collection, Geography III, was published in 1976 and dedicated to Methfessel. Bishop died two years later of a cerebral aneurysm.

Elizabeth Bishop was not, by any means, a prolific writer. She was famous for taking years to complete a poem, waiting until she felt it was exactly right before considering it finished.

The Complete Poems, 1927-1979, includes all of the poems from her previous volumes, plus uncollected poems and several translations. Her most recent book, Edgar Allen Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, is brilliantly edited and annotated by Alice Quinn. The collection is revealing not only because it introduces new material but because it fills the open spaces between Bishop's highly polished published pieces.

Bishop famously refused to include her work in an anthology of “women poets” because she did not want to be marginalized by any aspect of her personal identity.

Though she dedicated the poem “Anaphora” to Marjorie Stevens, the collection Questions of Travel to Lota Soares, and Geography III to Alice Methfessel, Bishop's lesbianism was no more prominent or apparent in her poetry than her gender or nationality.

And yet, these aspects are incredibly important in terms of how they influenced the lens from which Bishop interpreted and recorded her observations. Bishop's lesbian identity gave her, as Adrianne Rich aptly suggests, “an outsider's eye” and helped her “to perceive other kinds of outsiders and to identify, or try to identify, with them.”

This “Outsiderhood” was recently depicted in Marta Góes's play A Safe Harbor for Elizabeth Bishop, at the 59E59 Theater in New York City.

Under the direction of Richard Jay Alexander, Amy Irving portrays an authentic Elizabeth Bishop in this solo-show. The play follows Bishop through the years she spent living with Soares in Brazil, revealing the ups and downs of their relationship against the backdrop of Bishop's literary career and the changing politics and culture of the 1950s and 1960s.

Compared to Bishop's poetry, which often focuses in on a small moment, memory or subject, A Safe Harbor for Elizabeth Bishop, is expansive. Though the play moves rather quickly through the years, it slows down and distills important moments in Bishop's life--when she falls in love with Soares, discovering that she's won the Pulitzer, and Soares's suicide.

The playwright was born in the United States and raised in Brazil, near the house Bishop and Soares shared. Most of her research came from Bishop's rich collection of correspondences, One Art: Letters.

Bishop was a powerful and elusive figure. Irving captures her spirit, strength and fragility throughout the entire show, but the strongest moments come when she recites Bishop's original poetry, including “One Art” and “The Shampoo.” She uncovers the brutal honesty of the famous line “The art of losing isn't hard to master” as easily as the affection in “The shooting stars in your black hair/in bright formation/are flocking where,/so straight so soon?/--Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,/battered and shiny like the moon.”

Listening to Irving read is a reminder that a poem is best experienced when read aloud and that regardless of the writer's struggle and toil, poetry is meant to be enjoyed.

Heather Aimee O'Neill's work has appeared in several literary journals. She is a co-director for the Speakeasy Poetry Series in New York City and teaches creative writing at CUNY Hunter College.

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