This is the definitive edition of the work of one of America's greatest poets, increasingly recognized as one of the greatest English-language poets of the twentieth century, loved by readers and poets alike. Bishop's poems combine humor and sadness, pain and acceptance, and observe nature and lives in perfect miniaturist close-up. The themes central to her poetry are geography and landscapeâfrom New England, where she grew up, to Brazil and Florida, where she later livedâhuman connection with the natural world, questions of knowledge and perception, and the ability or inability of form to control chaos.
This new editionâedited by Saskia Hamiltonâoffers readers the opportunity to take in, entire, one of the great careers in twentiethcentury poetry.
Elizabeth Bishop's prose is not nearly as well known as her poetry, but she was a dazzling and compelling prose writer too, as the publication of her letters has shown. Her stories are often on the borderline of memoir, and vice versa. From her college days, she could find the most astonishing yet thoroughly apt metaphors to illuminate her ideas. This volumeâedited by the poet, Pulitzer Prizeâwinning critic, and Bishop scholar Lloyd Schwartzâincludes virtually all her published shorter prose pieces and a number of prose works not published until after her death. Here are her famous as well as her lesser-known stories, crucial memoirs, literary and travel essays, book reviews, andâfor the first timeâher original draft of Brazil, the Time/Life volume she repudiated in its published version, and the complete extant correspondence between Bishop and the poet Anne Stevenson, the author of the first book-length volume devoted to Bishop.