SOURCE: "'The Life-Saving Process,'" in The Nation, New York, Vol. 231, No. 22, December 27, 1980, pp. 710-12.

Shaw is an American poet, educator, and editor whose works include The Wonder of Seeing Double (1988). Below, he provides an overview of Journey around My Room, discussing in particular Bogan's difficult life.

Every part of the subtitle of this book [Journey Around My Room: The Autobiography of Louise Bogan, A Mosaic by Ruth Limmer] deserves comment. Louise Bogan, the well-known poet and critic who died at age 72 in 1970, never completed what in conventional terms could be called an autobiography. "Mosaic" is an apt word for this assemblage by Ruth Limmer, Bogan's literary executor, of widely disparate writings of a personal bent—journals and notebooks, short stories, articles, letters and poems (including a few not before published). In Limmer's imaginative but unobtrusive arrangement, these fragments fuse in a greater unity than one would have...