Exchanging Hats

It is not widely known that the poet Elizabeth Bishop was also a painter. ""From time to time I paint a small gouache or watercolor and give them to friends. They are Not Art--NOT AT ALL,"" she declared in 1971. Exchanging Hats collects 30 of Bishop's modest, graceful, sometimes primitive images of friends, flowers, landscapes, buildings and domestic interiors, edited and introduced by poet William Benton and accompanied by short, painterly excerpts from Bishop's prose writings on art and poetry.