It is surely one of the ironies of our time that Elizabeth Bishop, who in 1948 described herself to Robert Lowell as 'the loneliest personwho ever lived', has become after her death the most beloved poet of the 20th century. A good deal of her appeal is that she not only wrote poems 'with a painter's eye'; as a poet, she was essentially a painter, gifted with an innate sense of form and colour while adopting a Modernist attitude, after Paul Klee, towards traditional craftsmanship. The world for her was never easy to live in, and she approached it warily, as if it could be endured only if you looked at it, catching at rare moments what she stupendously called 'the surrealism ofeveryday life'.

As a poet, she was thoroughly professional, often labouring for months or years to perfect every line of a poem. As a painter she rejoiced in her 'primitivism'and worked quickly on flimsy paper, focusing on whatever she liked. The charm of her paintings - as the quotations from her letters and prose at the end of Exchanging Hats amply show - is that they were never intended to be Art. Bishop carried a paintbox in her luggage as a tourist carries a camera, to record sights that had delighted her or places she wanted to remember.

Because almost all these decorative tributes to the world she was so feelingly saw were intended to be personal gifts, they are invariably cheerful, full of flowers, toy-like views and beautiful, if simple, interiors. Look at them for a while, though, and you become aware of some uneasiness in her cosy room and landscapes. Her skies - yellow or cream or tan, never blue - can produce an effect of intense pressure or heat. Her tables are curiously askew, bearing their bunches of flowers almost desperately.

In his fine introduction to the second (paperback) edition of this intriguing book,William Benton points out connections between Bishop's poems and her paintings.An additional afterword suggests that as a painter she had more in common withthe figurative Postmodernists of the 1960s and 1970s than with the Abstract Expressionists who first inspired her. 'As a painter' he writes, 'she discovered in the limited range of her skills an intrinsic value... She was the elect of a primitive style - not a supplicant.' A beautiful book, then, not just for the coffee table but one well worth living with. Unfortunately, some of the colour reproductions in this new edition are muddy. Compared with the bright illustrations in the 1997 hardback, they are disappointingly dark. Otherwise, here's a miniature goldmine.