Product Description

This is the definitive edition of one of America's greatest poets, increasingly recognised as one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century, loved by readers and poets alike. This collection includes her four published volumes, fifty uncollected works, and translation of Octavio Paz, Max Jacob and others. Bishop's poems combine humour and sadness, pain and acceptance, and observe nature and lives in perfect miniaturist close-up. The themes central to her poetry are geography and landscape (from New England, where she grew up, to Brazil and Florida where she later lived), human connection with the natural world, questions of knowledge and perception, and the ability or inability of form to control chaos. Her father died when she was one, her mother was committed to a mental hospital when Elizabeth was five, and her life was often psychologically or physically difficult. She was witty and shunned self-pity, but some poems thinly conceal her estrangements as a woman, a lesbian, an orphan, a geographically rootless traveler, a frequently hospitalized asthmatic, and a sufferer of depression and alcoholism. "I'm not interested in big-scale work as such," she once told Lowell. "Something needn't be large to be good." 'When we read her, we enter the classical serenity of a new country,' Robert Lowell. If ever there was a poet whose every scrap of writing should be in print, that poet must be Elizabeth Bishop' Christopher Reid.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #56351 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Elizabeth Bishop was vehement about her art--a perfectionist who didn't want to be seen as a "woman poet". In 1977, two years before her death she wrote, "art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc., into two sexes is to emphasize values in them that are not art." She also deeply distrusted the dominant mode of modern poetry, one practiced with such detached passion by her friend Robert Lowell, the confessional.

Bishop was unforgiving of fashion and limited ways of seeing and feeling, but cast an even more trenchant eye on her own work. One wishes this volume were thicker, though the perfections within mark the rightness of her approach. The poems are sublimely controlled, fraught with word play, fierce moral vision (see her caustic ballad on Ezra Pound, "Visits to St Elizabeths") and reticence. From the surreal sorrow of the early "Man-Moth" (leaping off from a typo she had come across for "mammoth"), about a lonely monster who rarely emerges from "the pale subways of cement he calls his home", to the beauty of her villanelle "One Art" (with its repeated "the art of losing isn't hard to master"), the poet wittily explores distance and desolation, separation and sorrow.

From the Publisher
Beautiful new edition of Bishop's Complete Poems with a new Introduction by Tom Paulin, poet, academic & favourite of BBC 2's Newsnight Review audiences

About the Author
Elizabeth Bishop was born in Massachusetts in 1911. She lived for many years in Brazil with her partner, Lota de Macedo Soares. On Soares? death by suicide, she began to spend more time in the US and became poet-in-residence at Harvard University. Her many awards include the Pulitzer Prize (1956). She died in 1979.

Customer Reviews

Sensitive, mysterious and powerful poetry.
Elizabeth Bishop's accute observations provide a fascinating insight into the mysteries that surround her. The poet's confusion over identity and belonging are artfully moulded in a series of fine poems, some semi-autobiographical, which explore the nature of travel and self.

The first poem in the collection, 'The Map', explores the importance of place, whilst 'Questions of Travel' marks a shift in her ideology. Bishop questions: "Is it right to be watching strangers in a play/ in this strangest of theatres?" and wonders whether we should "have stayed at home,/ wherever that may be?"

Bishop's detailed observations are perhaps most extraordinary in her contemplation of animals. Her animal poems, including 'The Moose', 'The Fish' and 'Roosters' are curious and insightful in their exploration of the animal kingdom and the effects animals have on humans.

In addition the wonders of childhood are developed in many of her poems, with 'Sestina' and 'First Death in Nova Scotia' being especially poignant in their pathos.

Bishop's accessible style makes the reading of her 'Complete Poems' a treat. You cannot help but become enthralled by the mysterious poet.

astonishing poetry
For many, Bishop is the quintessential American poet of the twentieth century. Subtle, crafted and frequently surreal, her poems tend to centre on loss, travel and the way we understand ourselves through the physical world around us. Her exquisite acts of describing islands, animals, ports and quietly untidy human habitations on the fringes show a thinking, exhiliratingly alert mind in action. This is oblique and layered poetry which reveals more on each re-reading. Her sestinas and villanelle 'One Art' are also the best in the business. This edition contains all her best known poems including 'The Bight', 'Crusoe in England', 'The Armadillo', 'Sandpiper', 'The Map' and 'The Fish'. Give it a try: these beautiful poems will stay with you long afterwards.

Puzzled - lack of Perception?
Is it me or is it Elizabeth Bishop? - following recommendations I do find her work a disappointment. There is, I suppose, an over florid verbosity which I usually associate with American "creative writing" ... too many lovingly inserted adjectives which somehow entangle rather than elucidate, and here, strangely, choices of wording which somehow mis-directed me towards interpretations different from those intended. My fault, or hers? - I find the analysis difficult, but the truth is that I was left cold and untouched.