Examining the poet's view of the human body and issues of embodiment,
Colwell provides an accessible, close reading of Bishop's poetry.

Inscrutable Houses examines Elizabeth Bishop's
paradoxical relationship to the concept of embodiment as it evolves in
the poems of her four published books. Anne Colwell looks at how Bishop
uses metaphors of the body to express her powerful ambivalence about human
form, at how Bishop moves between pessimism, expressing the idea that the
body is the reason for all human loss and misunderstanding, and optimism,
seeing the body as the medium for all human connection, for love and knowledge.

A combined focus on metaphors of the body in her published
work and Bishop's means of arriving at these metaphors through her compositional
process therefore highlights important connections between the poet's work
and her life, particularly her childhood losses, the influence of contemporary
poets, and her personal relationships. Bishop published four collections
of poetry, numerous short stories, autobiographical sketches, and several
prose pieces on travel. Her double collection titled Poems: North and
South--ACold Spring, published in 1955, won the Pulitzer Prize, and
the later collection Complete Poems (1969) earned her the National
Book Award.

Colwell's innovative reading not only is valuable in itself
but also gives deeper insight into a great and inßuential poet and
contributes to the arguments of more overtly theoretical readings of Bishop's
work.