"Cognitive Poetic Readings in Elizabeth Bishop" is the first full-length cognitive poetic study of a single author and her composition process. It turns to cognitive linguistics in interpreting the poet's alternate construals - poetic conceptualizations recorded in manuscript material. The book demonstrates how our awareness of such universal structures of invention as categorization, image schemas, metaphor, conceptual integration, metonymy, idealized cognitive models, licensing stories (presented in Part One) can assist us in deducing the original movement of writing during genetic analysis or in arriving at a reading of the poem's published version.

Within the framework of cognitive poetics, grounded as it is in a systematic study of the human mind, we can appreciate the American poet's conceptual universe structured by the pattern MENTAL LIFE/POETIC CREATIVITY IS AN EXPLORATION OF A VISUAL FIELD. This pattern embraces, as well as influences, Bishop's elaborating and questioning of the conventional metaphor MIND IS A BODY MOVING IN SPACE, which lies at the centre of her poetics. Her career-long commitment to dramatize the mind in action - "to portray, not a thought, but a mind thinking" - is sampled and examined in Part Two, which conducts detailed analyses of eight poems, including drafts, typescripts, notes, journal entries, sketches, letters: Elizabeth Bishop's avant-textes. Here the genetic search for the cognizing mind engaged in composition complements the cognitive research into meaning construction, and, conversely, cognitive poetics assists genetic criticism in portraying a mind thinking in the process of writing.

"Cognitive Poetic Readings in Elizabeth Bishop" portrays also a mind reading, as it investigates Bishop scholarship to show how cognitive poetics can justify the critical intuitions of Bishop scholars and guide us in our search for a reading.