The poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell met in 1947 at a New York dinner party held by Randall Jarrell. She was 36 and had just published her first book of poems. He was 30 and had just won a Pulitzer Prize. Later, she wrote that she'd gone to the party with "fear and trembling." "Then Lowell arrived and I loved him at first sight. . . . My shyness vanished and we started talking at once. . . . I remember thinking that it was the first time I had ever actually talked with some one about how one writes poetry-and thinking that it was[,] that it could be[,] strangely easy. Like exchanging recipes for making a cake." ...they grew to depend on each other as partners in art. They had a lot in common: Both came from old, well-off New England families. Both had had difficult and lonely childhoods, particularly Bishop, whose father died when she was an infant and whose mother disappeared into a mental hospital when she was five. They seldom spoke to each other of these things, or of Bishop's crippling uncertainty and alcoholism, or of Lowell's bouts of mania, which landed him, over and over, first in some new woman's bed and then in a mental institution...Instead, their letters were a refuge, warmed with constant praise...These 800 pages of determined charm get a little wearing after a while; this is a book for the true fan. But you can dip into it at any point and come out with a gem of insight or observation from either writer. - Reviewed in the Village Voice