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It is perhaps in that strange, simultaneous comprehension of joy and loss that a poet's finest art is both created and appreciated. Certainly, in Divisions of the Heart: Elizabeth Bishop and the Art of Memory and Place these two seemingly contradictory elements of joy and loss are explored and celebrated, primarily through what John Barrell (in analyzing John Clare's work) terms a "sense of place." Divisions of the Heart is the result of a 1998 conference held on Bishop at Acadia University; it has twenty-five of the papers presented at that symposium in which to examine - sometimes critically, sometimes not so critically - how Elizabeth Bishop's art treats space, both physical and mental. The extremes of joy and loss, bound up in the landscapes of the mind as well as the Earth, seem to be a very useful way to approach the Pulitzer Prize winning poet's work; it is this theme, or rather, an understanding of it, that emerges from this anthology.

The volume is organized in two main sections: Place/Memory, and The Art of Division. Each contains eleven essays. Place/Memory, the first of these sections, follows this theme most closely. Laura Jehn Menides' essay, for example, contends that "the comic is as important as the tragic" in Bishop's work. Citing "The Country Mouse," and also the Geography III opening poem, "In the Waiting Room," Menides suggests that Bishop's humour has often been overlooked in previous analyses. The Art of Division section, in contrast, is a bit more free-ranging. The section offers everything from Bishop translations of Octavio Paz to the poet's oceanscapes as a means to grasp the joy and inevitable losses dealt with by Bishop in poems where, as Barbara Comins puts it, "the specific recurring trope of the mysterious, changeable and sometimes joyous sea constituted one of Bishop's ways of sounding her selfhood and clandestine sexuality" (189).

Almost like bookends for the Place/Memory and The Art of Division sections are two one-essay sections appearing at the beginning and end of the volume. At the front, in the section Her Own Prodigal, is the keynote address from the conference, a piece by Anne Stevenson titled "The Geographical Mirror." The end of the volume, likewise, contains only Gary Fountain's essay, "'Maple Leaf (Forever)': Elizabeth Bishop's Politics of National Identity," in a section called Borderlands. Fountain puts a political spin on the place question by asking "in what place, in what nation, might the authentic self, a real but not hidden Elizabeth Bishop, reside comfortably?"(293). As other essays in the collection deal at least tangentially with questions of borders, boundaries, and "borderworld[s]" - Brian Bartlett's essay on Bishop's treatment of coasts is only one example - the purpose of these choices in organization could, to some degree, be called into question.

But this is a minor issue, marking only slightly a collection in which Bishop's poems, most especially "Sestina," "The Moose," "In the Waiting Room," "The Fish" and others receive a lot of critical attention, attention that duly notes what these poems offer to their readers in the simple joys of existing, of truly taking in both interior and exterior scenes, of capturing the humour in the common tragedies of everyday life. That the sometimes inexpressible joy encountered in Bishop's work is very often accompanied by deprivations of all sorts has been skillfully woven into the analysis of even the most celebratory essays. But it is this type of focus that may have led the collection to cover, on the whole, some critical ground more thoroughly than others, both in terms of the poems treated as well as in the overall affectionate tone of the book.

Still, in spite of (probably also because of) these essayists' affection for Bishop, their interpretations contribute considerable depth and breadth to the scholarship. The suggestion may be made that, although Elizabeth Bishop made her name in the United States, her creativity was irrefutably launched by an early childhood in a Fundy coastal village. By way of illustration, in "'It Was to Be': Elizabeth Bishop, the Burning Boy and Other Childish Marvels," a convincing argument on the power of early influences is seen in Peter Sanger's insightful reading of "Sestina" and "Casabianca"; "the world of childhood, of Great Village, of an elementary school reader plays counterpoint to the world of experience, suffering and self-revelation in the poetry Bishop offered in 1946 when she published North & South" (48-50). By the same token, the essays by Patricia Dwyer, Marian White Bannerman, and Jeffery Donaldson, as well as the photo essay by Sandra Barry "remind us," as Barry does with these words, "that loss is not a disaster. It is an inevitable part of life. Yet the lost remains as resonant as the found because of our capacity to remember" (149). That interplay of joy and loss, critically plumbed, is the basis of Divisions of the Heart, and it is particularly apparent in that first main section of the book, Place/Memory, where these essays are located.

Eclecticism is the most striking feature of the other main section of the book. In examining this notion of a sense of place, The Art of Division section neatly and nearly runs through the entire twentieth century's most prominent critical traditions - from formalism to Northrup Frye, from New Criticism to queer studies. Ted Colson's charming entreaty, "'Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance': A McLuhan Mosaic," has form echoing argument in its suggestion that the "lists of pictures" in "Over 2,000 Illustrations" and "In the Waiting Room" make a tactile type of sense, rather than a linear one (223). In a delightful manner, Colson's commentary presages the chief and difficult discussion of the book's next essay, "'The Round, Turning World': Place, Memory and Metaphor in 'In the Waiting Room.'" In this paper, Michael Happy argues the point "that there are effectively only two ways to read the art of words we call literature: metonymically and metaphorically" (229). While some of these essays follow more obscure paths of critical analysis, they nonetheless offer valuable connections between the concrete realities of Bishop's life and art, and the world of critical theory whose aims have been multi-directional in assessing her work through the years.

Beyond the matters of contents, theme, and style, the book itself, in its overall design, is a pleasure to read, hold and behold. The cover's shadowy Bishop signature and the easy to read text inside make for reinforcement of the idea about the strict placement in the universe Bishop and her poetry argue for. "Bishop's sensitivity to the functions of geography"(104) as Lorrie Goldensohn notes in her essay "The Homeless Eye," may have resulted in her feeling forever homeless, but in the striving for a homeplace her poetry left its mark - a mark coloured by the red mud of the Bay of Fundy. The design of Divisions of the Heart echoes this. Gaspereau Press, who have paid similarly close attention to every book they publish (including Governor General's Award winner George Elliott Clarke's stark, artful and courageous collection, Execution Poems), are to be commended for the simple yet effective way they have put together Divisions of the Heart.

Finally, what is most impressive about this collection is its thoroughness. In recreating the Acadia conference in print, the book's able editors have, in effect, done a great deal more. They have offered to Bishop scholars and the more general Bishop reader-admirer some engaging enlargements of that corpus. Fitting accompaniments to the book are Bishop's The Complete Poems and The Collected Prose; a good, strong, properly prepared pot of tea and some biscuits; and a comfortable chair - one preferably with a view of the Bay of Fundy or Great Village, about which and from which Bishop wrote so perfectly and intricately. For its role in illuminating her art, Divisions of the Heart, with its many divisions and divinations, adds up to a probing and useful work.