Product Description
Highly regarded throughout her prestigious literary career, and today seen as an undeniable master of her art, Elizabeth Bishop remains one of America's most influential and widely acclaimed poets. This is the definitive collection of her work. The Complete Poems includes the books North & South, A Cold Spring, Questions of Travel, and Geography III, as well as previously uncollected poems, translations, and juvenilia.
Amazon.com Review
Elizabeth Bishop was vehement about her art--a perfectionistwho didn't want to be seen as a "woman poet." In 1977, twoyears before her death she wrote, "art is art and to separatewritings, paintings, musical compositions, etc., into two sexes is toemphasize values in them that are not art." She also deeplydistrusted the dominant mode of modern poetry, one practiced withsuch detached passion by her friend Robert Lowell, the confessional.

Bishop was unforgiving of fashion and limited ways of seeing andfeeling, but cast an even more trenchant eye on her own work. Onewishes this volume were thicker, though the perfections within markthe rightness of her approach. The poems are sublimely controlled,fraught with word play, fierce moral vision (see her caustic ballad onEzra Pound, "Visits to St. Elizabeths"), and reticence.From the surreal sorrow of the early "Man-Moth" (leaping offfrom a typo she had come across for "mammoth"), about alonely monster who rarely emerges from "the pale subways ofcement he calls his home," to the beauty of her villanelle"One Art" (with its repeated "the art of losing isn'thard to master"), the poet wittily explores distance anddesolation, separation and sorrow. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (25)

Thumbs up
Book arrived on time and in the condition ordered. I'd definitely order from these folks again.

Rediscovering Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop was born in 1911 and died more than 30 years ago in 1979. Along the way, she picked up just about every writing award that's given - the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book critics Circle Award, two Guggenheim fellowships, and a lot more.

I was introduced to her poetry in the mid-1970s, and I "backed" into it. At the time I was reading everything ever written by and about Flannery O'Connor, and she and Bishop had been good friends until O'Connor's death in 1964 of complications from lupus. I reintroduced myself to Bishop's poetry this year, and I'm glad I did.

This volume of her complete poems (including some done at 16 that she might have preferred to remain unpublished) was first issued in 1984. It includes all of the poetry published in her lifetime, either in separate volumes or in magazines and journals. But there's more - the poems from youth, various poems not collected until this volume, the translations of other poets' work from the Portuguese and Spanish, such as Octavio Paz.

The poems cover territory that ranges from the sublime to the mundane (and it doesn't get more mundane that waiting in a dentist's office; see "In the Waiting Room"). Her poems are spare, exhibiting almost a hardness at times, before a certain wryness pulls you back. From "A Cold Spring" (1955):

A cold spring;
the violet was flawed on the lawn.
For two weeks or more the trees hesitated;
the little leaves waited,
carefully indicating their characteristics.
Finally a grave green dust
settled over your bug and aimless hills.
One day, in a chill white blast of sunshine,
on the side of one a calf was born.
The mother stopped lowing
and took a long time eating the after-birth,
a wretched flag,
but the calf got up promptly
and seemed inclined to feel gay.

To read a volume of poems like this one is to read the poet's life. The reader has the benefit of seeing that life collected; the poet, of course, didn't live it that way. But the poems tell us she lived a great life, and a full one, and it is a tribute to the poet that they read as well today as they did when they written40 and 50 and 60 years ago.

I lost this 2 days after receiving it
I bought this book after hearing Cameron Diaz recite one of the poems in the movie 'In her shoes', I brought it to work and someone thought they needed it more than I did.However, the book itself arrived promptly and I was very pleased

the portrait of the artist as a conscientious wordsmith
Shampooing With Liz:
Elizabeth Bishop's Personal Accountability

18 April 2007

Of course, you will discuss his poems--
but talk about his beauty, too,
the delicate beauty we loved.
--C. P. Cavafy
"For Ammonis, Who Died At Twenty-Nine, In 610,"
from The Collected Poems Of C. P. Cavafy:
A New Translation (2006), trans. Aliki Barnstone
_________

Their constitutional inability to talk about gay in any context at all--the editors were men's men--precluded even a pretense of compassion.
--Paul Monette
"Getting Covered," from Last Watch Of The Night: Essays Too Personal And Otherwise (1994)

_________

`Deny deny deny'
-- Elizabeth Bishop
"Roosters," from North & South (1946)

Elizabeth Bishop's complete poetry, that small mound amounting to no more than 300 pages, contains a kind of grandeur and "natural heroism"--a veritable Kilimanjaro in the form of verse. Shy, one-of-a-kind and not very prolific (though she was a prodigious letter writer), Bishop's poetry is remarkable for its sensitivity, wit and a forceful reticence. It is this last quality that I want to discuss in detail.

Against the backdrop of Confessionalism--a literary "movement" with Robert Lowell, a close associate of Bishop's, at the helm--Elizabeth Bishop draws into her personal and unique psyche and a life rife with travels to give relief to a body of work replete with deep feelings. One characteristic that distinguishes Bishop from the confessional poets is, although intimate and personal, her poetry is not marked with messy autobiographical facts that oftentimes colored the works of, say, Lowell 's. Bishop, however, does reveal, to my mind, the accidents that make up her autobiography in subtler ways.

Chief of these accidental facts is her homosexuality. Although Bishop did not care to align herself with sexually, racially and class-based categorizations, especially when it came to her poetry, Bishop is one of our poets who is truly conscious of these issues. (I don't blame her. Trust me--I've had my fill of the R.G.C. [Race Gender Class] police-teachers in college so I understand Bishop's stance.) In light of this, a poet worth her salt naturally knows that every word counts and a wordsmith is instinctively aware of the effects of his employment of a word or phrase--both are conscious and conscientious in their "insidious intent," in their word's worth. And a look at the witty ways evident in her first two books of poems (North & South and A Cold Spring) demonstrate clearly her stealth design.

I found five instances where Bishop employs the word "queer"--

"He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers" ("The Man-Moth")

"queer cupids of all persons getting up" ("Love Lies Sleeping")

"`But that queer sea looks made of wood,
half-shining, like a driftwood sea..." ("The Monument")

"On the east steps the Air Force Band
in uniforms of Air Force blue
is playing hard and loud, but--queer--
the music doesn't quite come through." ("View Of The Capitol
From The Library Of Congress)

"and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves" ("Letter To N.Y.")

--two instances of the word "gay"--

"but the calf got up promptly
and seemed inclined to feel gay." ("A Cold Spring")

"And while the fireflies
are failing to illuminate these nightmare trees
might they not be his green gay eyes." (`III / While Someone Telephones'
from "Four Poems")

--two instances of the word "flit" (I first encountered this word and its "shadow side" (to borrow a funny and smart term Anne Carson uses to describe her modern-day Geryon in her celebrated Autobiography Of Red), from reading The Catcher In The Rye, a book with characters trying to come to grips with their sexuality--

"Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him." ("The Man-Moth")

"Across the floor flits the mechanical toy,
fit for a king of several centuries back" ("Cirque d'Hiver")

--two instances of the term "invert" in its many forms (a consultation with the dictionary reveals the fabulous etymology of this word, with its common meaning of being upside-down, but also an archaic "sexual condition" in the field of psychology [Freud employed this word in his diagnosis again and again], and its Latin root vertere meaning to turn--or, in effect, poetry!)--

"the city grows down into his open eyes
inverted and distorted" ("Love Lies Sleeping")

"So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well
into that world inverted
where left is always right" ("Insomnia")

There must be many other examples where Bishop accounts for her English.

In a recent Writers' Colloquium at The New School, during the question-and-answer period, Paul Muldoon talks about the ways a poet is held liable for the words he uses. His example: If one were to use a word like "skunk", one had better know that word's history.

Though not forthcoming about her personal life, there is no denying that Elizabeth Bishop has done her share of etymological-archeological legwork. On the surface, some of the words she uses, in their various contexts, have a direct meaning to that context. I hope the exhibition above is but a small sample of the poet being aware of not the surfaces but also the multitude of layers a word wears.

Of course, we shall talk about her poems--the beauty, the delicacy that constitute her body of work. But if we are at once deliberative and open, perhaps we may derive an alternative--no, an additional--insight into the complexities of the poems we so cherished?

Jan 2008
I find this work so useful to me. Every mornig I wake up and read a poem, always inspiring and comforting. Elizabeth turns everything to emotions which are a true image of what is reality. ... Read more

Product Description
Presented in two sections, "Memory: Persons and Places" and "Stories," this book offers the collected prose writings of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79), one of America's most celebrated and admired poets. The selections are arranged not by date of compostion, but in biographical order, such that reading this volume greatly enriches one's understanding of Bishop's life--and thus her poetry as well. "Bishop's admirers will want to consult her Collected Prose for the light it sheds on her poetry," as David Lehman wrote in Newsweek. "They will discover, however, that it is more than just a handsome companion volume to [her] Complete Poems. . . . Bishop's clean, limpid prose makes her stories and memoirs a delight to read. . . . One regrets only that this volume cannot be added to in years to come."
Amazon.com Review
Farrar, Straus and Giroux first published Elizabeth Bishop'sCollected Prose in 1984, five years after the poet's death. It's nowtoo late to ask whether this deeply private woman would have allowedsuch an act, let alone approved of the biographies and studies thathave begun to appear. It's not too late, however, to praise hereditor's decision to gather her fiction and nonfictiontogether. Without it we would not have the dreamlike "The Sea &Its Shore" (in which a man hired to rid the beach of trash triesto make sense of each scrap of writing he comes upon) or memoirs suchas "Primer Class," which begins, "Every time I see longcolumns of numbers, handwritten in a certain way, a strange sensationor shudder, partly aesthetic, partly painful goes through mydiaphragm." Precise as ever, Bishop continues, "It is likeseeing the dorsal fin of a large fish suddenly cut through the surfaceof the water." The collection's two standouts are "Effortsof Affection," a memoir of her mentor Marianne Moore, and thecomic masterwork "The U.S.A. School of Writing." The latteris a sly recollection of her first job--at a deeply dodgycorrespondence school. "Henry James once said that he who wouldaspire to be a writer must inscribe on his banner the one word'Loneliness.' In the case of my students, their need was not to wardoff society, but to get into it." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Brilliant prose from a brilliant poet
Ellizabeth Bishop's memoirs are as individual and remarkable as her poetry. The insight that the former gives to a reader of the latter deepens the reader's pleasure in both.

A delicate collection.
I hope that I will be forgiven for saying that as much as I enjoyed this volume of Bishop's prose, I still don't find it as robust as her poetry.While lovely, some of these entries were so slight I was afraid to breathe and break them.

The book is divided into two halves-- a series of memories and a series of stories. I liked the memories section the best: particularly "The Country Mouse" and her memoir of Marianne Moore. Of the stories, I liked "Gwendolyn" the best-- a story about a dying little girl (which is not nearly as saccharine as it sounds from that description.)

I enjoyed this book, I *think* I enjoyed it in its own right. But if I'm honest, I'm not sure how I would have felt about it had I not already loved Bishop's poems so much.

The Collected Prose
As in all of the writings by Elizabeth Bishop, The Collected Prose allows the reader to open the door into her masterfully brilliant and private world of thoughts.I took this book to the beach each night before the sunwent down and read one or two of her poems ...Bishop's ability to connectour everyday actions with a deeper, higher meaning makes this book one ofmy all time favorites.She is truly a wonderful creator and writer! ... Read more

Product Description
A Stonewall Honor Book of the American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table"Rare and Commonplace Flowers performs an invaluable service: unforgettably memorializing the remarkable Lota de Macedo Soares, and in the process filling in a crucial gap in Bishop's biography. This book honors a deeply moving love between two brilliant women: each highly public, a celebrity in her own nation; each deeply private, and happy (for a time) in the fragile heaven of their home."-The New York Times Book Review"As a portrait of Lota and Bishop in Brazil, Rare and Commonplace Flowers is a rare and illuminating book."-Women's Review of Books"Novelist Oliveira's engaging dual biography tells of [Bishop and Soares's] 'long and sad' relationship. . . . This book offers a new perspective on the American poet, and the love story between these two women is undeniably intense and tragic. Recommended."-Library JournalRare and Commonplace Flowers tells the story of two fascinating and controversial women. Elizabeth Bishop, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, sought artistic inspiration in Brazil. There she fell in love with Lota de Macedo Soares, a self-trained Brazilian architect. This dual biography-brilliantly researched, and written in a lively, novelistic style-follows their relationship from 1951 to 1967, the time when the two lived together in Brazil.A tale of two artists and two cultures, Rare and Commonplace Flowers offers unique perspectives on both women and their work. Carmen L. Oliveira provides an unparalleled level of detail and insight, due to both her familiarity with Brazil and her access to the country's artistic elite, many of whom had a direct connection with Bishop and Soares. Rare pictures of the two artists and their home bring this unique story to life.Carmen L. Oliveira is a Brazilian novelist. Neil K. Besner is a professor in the English department at the University of Winnipeg in Canada. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Plesasurable reading
Rare and Commonplace Flowers innovates in the scholarly field. A carefully documented biography, it reconstructs step by step the story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares.Carmen Oliveira's literary achievement lies in conveying this research of undeniable academid value in a very agreeable piece of storytelling.A must for Women's Studies, the book is recommended to anyone who enjoys a good read.

At last, in English!
This book is a treasure, a delightful read.It speaks to a broad range of interests.Fans of Elizabeth Bishop will enjoy learning about her relationship with Lota and her experiences during the 17 years she lived in Brazil.If you are interested in Brazilian history and politics, you will find a rare account of the early sixties in Rio de Janeiro, as the country headed toward military dictatorship.It is also a marvelous and tragic love story.

As an American living in Brazil for the past 20 years, I found it a fascinating account of how Lota and her country provided a haven for Bishop, an orphan prone to writer's block and alcoholism.Rare and Commonplace Flowers, read in addition to Bishop's letters, opens a whole new window on her writing. Ever since I read the original in Portuguese, in 1995, I have been convinced that it merits the attention of non-Portuguese speakers.Thanks to the excellent translation of Neil Besner, you've got it! ... Read more

Product Description
Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz, editors

James Merrill described Elizabeth Bishop's poems as "more wryly radiant, more touching, more unaffectedly intelligent than any written in our lifetime" and called her "our greatest national treasure." Robert Lowell said, "I enjoy her poems more than anybody else's." Long before a wider public was aware of Bishop's work, her fellow poets expressed astonished admiration of her formal rigor, fiercely observant eye, emotional intimacy, and sometimes eccentric flights of imagination. Today she is recognized as one of America's great poets of the 20th century. This unprecedented collection offers a full-scale presentation of a writer of startling originality, at once passionate and reticent, adventurous and perfectionist. It presents all the poetry that Bishop published in her lifetime, in such classic volumes as North & South, A Cold Spring, Questions of Travel, and Geography III. In addition it contains an extensive selection of un_published poems and drafts of poems (several not previously collected), as well as all her published poetic translations, ranging from a chorus from Aristophanes' The Birds to versions of Brazilian sambas.

Poems, Prose, and Letters brings together as well most of her published prose writings, including stories; reminiscences; travel writing about the places (Nova Scotia, Florida, Brazil) that so profoundly marked her poetry; and literary essays and statements, including a number of pieces published here for the first time. The book is rounded out with a selection of Bishop's irresistibly engaging and self-revelatory letters. Of the 53 letters included here, written between 1933 and 1979, a considerable number are printed for the first time, and all are presented in their entirety. Their recipients include Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Randall Jarrell, Anne Stevenson, May Swenson, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

A Beautiful Book, Highly Recommended
For my money, this book beats out Bishop's "Collected Poems" (from Farrar Sraus & Giroux) or any of the other separate volumes of Bishop's writing (be it letters, prose, etc.). In this volume you not only get all of her collected and uncollected poems, but there's also a very generous selection of her letters and prose. So for all but the most hardcore Bishop fans, this one volume should satisfy most of their Bishop-reading needs. Also, as with all of Library of America's books, this volume is a very handsome edition in hardcover with a very professional binding that will last much longer than any of Bishop's cheaper, soft-cover editions. In addition, I greatly prefer this edition's typography to the above-mentioned "Collected Poems."

Where are the rest of Bishop's letters?
This carefully edited book collects much of Bishop's poetry and prose--fiction, memoir, reportage, reviews--between two covers for the first time, and that is all for the good.

The best introduction to Bishop's work, however, is still "The Complete Poems, 1927 - 1979," supplemented by the best pieces in "The Collected Prose" (1984), edited by Robert Giroux, who is also co-editor of the present Library of America book and editor of "One Art" (1994), the mammoth selection of Bishop's letters. The earlier editions of her poems and prose were published in an era when editors still respected Bishop's excellent judgment about which of her poems and prose pieces should appear in print. Bishop was her own best editor, and I don't think the publication of so many of her abortive poems serves her particularly well.

My main criticism of this book has to do with the "Letters" section. As with the Library of America edition of Flannery O'Connor's writing, this selection offers letters not available in "One Art" (or in O'Connor's case, "The Habit of Being"); but the Library of America edition does not supersede "One Art" because it offers fewer letters in total. Both O'Connor and Bishop were epistolary geniuses on the level of Keats and Hopkins and we deserve editions of their letters that aspire to comprehensiveness. There is a new edition of Bishop's correspondence with Lowell on the way, but what about her letters to Marianne Moore, May Swenson, and other friends with whom she had significant correspondences?

I suppose ardent readers of Bishop's letters are supposed to photocopy the letters published in this Library of America edition and stick them in "One Art" in order to have all of the in-print Bishop letters (which are a fraction of the letters she actually wrote) in one place. I am happy to do this, but aren't Library of America editions supposed to collect ALL of a writer's most important work in one or more volumes? I would rather have Bishop's poems and non-epistolary prose in one Library of America volume, and a more complete edition of her letters in another, even if the letters book were longer in coming. The Library of America edition of Hart Crane, another epistolary genius, is comprised mostly of letters, in part (I suspect) because the editor had a new edition of Crane's letters to select from. (In fact the same person edited both Crane books).

Giroux refers to his "files of Elizabeth's vast correspondence" (p. 944). When will these files become available to the rest of us in the form of a "Collected Letters of Elizabeth Bishop," which would no doubt be a multi-volume work, or even an expanded edition of "One Art"? The latter book, as far as I can tell, is not mentioned at all in this Library of America edition--why not? Has Giroux decided to "disappear" his own wonderful edition of Bishop's letters?

I suspect this Library of America edition of Bishop was rushed to press in order to capitalize on all the recent attention paid to Alice Quinn's selection of Bishop's unpublished poems, and the attention that is about to be paid to the forthcoming Bishop/Lowell correspondence. Why not wait a few more years until the shape of the Bishop canon is a bit clearer to publish an apparently definitive volume such as the present Library of America book? Quinn is currently editing Bishop's notebooks and journals, which promise to be fascinating, but which this Library of America book does not excerpt at all.

Bishop herself was a voracious reader of other writer's letters and journals, and she even taught a course in epistolary writing at Harvard in the early 1970s. I wish editors and publishers would take a cue from Bishop's own interest in letter-writing and publish more of her letters. As anyone who has read "One Art" or the letters published in this Library of America edition knows, Bishop's letters are the ultimate pleasure reading. A bigger edition of her letters would probably not supplant the latest Dan Brown book on the best-seller lists, but there is a larger market for it than one might suppose.

Elizabeth Bishop
I got this book for my sister as a gift and she absolutely loves it.It is a nice compilation of Elizabeth Bishop's work put out as part of a series of great authors by the Library of America.

LONGING FOR THE PAST WISHING FOR THE FUTURE
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT OUR PAST INTELLECTUAL LIFE AND WISH YOU COULD BE PART OF IT NOW THEN ELIZABETH BISHOP IS A MUST

The absolute definitive compilation of Elizabeth Bishop's works
Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters is the Library of America's compilation of the works of twentieth century poet and author Elizabeth Bishop - including all her published poetic translations, an extensive selection of her unpublished poems and drafts of poems, several not previously collected, and of course, all the poetry published in her lifetime. Non-poetry writings range from her stories and reminiscences to travel writings, literary essays, and statements, even a number of pieces published for the first time. The absolute definitive compilation of Elizabeth Bishop's works, highly recommended especially for public and college library collections. ... Read more

Product Description
From several thousand letters written by Elizabeth Bishop--beginning in 1928, when she was 17 (and already a poet), to the day of her death in 1979--Robert Giroux, Bishop's editor during her lifetime, has selected over 500 and has written a detailed and informative introduction. "(A) quite exceptional and wonderful work."--Tom Paulin, Times Literary Supplement.Amazon.com Review
One Art is the best biography we have of the elusiveElizabeth Bishop. Robert Giroux, her editor and friend, has chosenwell--and discreetly--from among the poet's several thousandletters. The collection begins with correspondence she wrote whilestill at Vassar in the '30s and ends with a letter written on the dayshe died, October 6, 1979. ("Well, I could go on--but Iwon't!" Bishop writes.) Still, we now have more than 600 pages ofwitty, well-mannered missives that often shade into deepemotion. Seemingly casual observation is a staple of Bishop's art anda delight in the letters: writing to MarianneMoore in 1938, she asserts that an unappealing stray she isnonetheless feeding looks just like Picasso's AbsintheDrinker. Nor is she any less irreverent when it comes to thelifestyles of the poetic and famous. In 1950, she tells RobertLowell that she's reading Yeats'sA Vision--"or trying to. Have you? Sometimes it'sJungian. The picture of Yeats going 'Woof! Woof!' in a lower berth, inthe dark, in California, in order to wake up his wife, who wasdreaming she was a cat, is very pleasing, I think."

Bishopoften hid her sadness behind charm, but she could also beastonishingly frank. In addition to the personal revelations, thereare discussions of poems' origins. "Quite a few lines of 'At theFishhouses' came to me in a dream," she tells U. T. and JosephSummers. "And the scene--which was real enough, I'd recently beenthere--but the old man and the conversation, etc., were all in a laterdream." One caveat: Robert Giroux has kept commentary and notesto a minimum, so it's worth reading his introduction for deepbackground before you begin. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

This collection changed my life
I was a junior in college when I first read this book and subsequently viewed some of Elizabeth Bishop's handwritten poems/manuscripts/letters, etc. at the New York Public Library's Hand of the Poet exhibit. I was in love, enthralled, forever changed by this amazing woman's poems and her voice. These letters are an intimate look into the life of one of the most talented and elusive poets of the 20th Century. What a life of heartbreak and obstacle and yet she remained keenly interested in the human challenge--and amazingly connected to those she knew. In this age where the art of communication has been nearly wholly lost, to read this collection of letters is like stepping back in time. Bishop reminds us that the most important connections are those we make with others--and that taking the time to put pen to paper and to fully observe our world is the most priceless gift. I cannot recommend this collection highly enough. Buy one for yourself and one for any young person you know. Inspire yourself to write letters and learn from a true master. Bishop's voice and the intricacies of her personality shine through in this collection. A rare find from a rare and truly incredible poet.

I Fell In Love With Elizabeth Bishop All Over Again!
In this amazing collection of Elizabeth Bishop's selected letters, all of the various nuances of her most personal voice --warm, intimate, keenly observant, whimsical and humorous, generous, shy, gutwrenchingly honest, decorous and demure -- come through with astonishing human clarity.Bishop's engaging and elegant epistolary style makes reading One Art almost like reading an epistolary novel.The collection certainly functions as a fascinatingly candid biography of the somewhat shy and elusive Bishop, and also provides marvelous glimpses of both her writing processes, and the contextual background against which many of her poems emerged.Mostly, though, I found myself liking Elizabeth Bishop to excess . . . her humor, her eye for detail, her weirdly shy and modest charisma, even her flaws . . . and wishing that I could have been one of her inner circle of friends receiving these wonderful letters.

Revelations of the Artist
These letters provide a fascinating insight into the poet, who was as compelling in prose as in poetry. I love Bishop's work, and I am enjoying this book! ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

A must-read!
Cheryl Walker's book on Elizabeth Bishop and God is spectacular. It explores a poet's spiritual journey that is filled with challenging questions spanning a lifetime. I think that this text is essential reading for anyone interested in Bishop, poetry and spirituality, and women's spirituality. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (2)

Where you are
"Geography III" was Elizabeth Bishop's final volume of poetry, and it was published only a few years before her death. Sadly this is not her best work, but it's still a vivid, colourful collection of poetry, which focuses on little interactions and striking memories.

It opens with Bishop reminiscing about a dental appointment as a child, and how she read National Geographic to keep herself amused. But these mundane things fall away as Bishop is hit by the shocking quality of the world: "I said to myself: three days/and you'll be seven days old./I was saying it to stop/the sensation of falling off/the round turning world..."

The poems that follow are just as locked in Bishop's own world: her tiny island with its fifty-two volcanoes, poisonous cities, a New Brunswick bus' passengers spotting a moose, a beloved town full of familiar things, a warrior's perspective on an ashtray, a late winter walk on the beach, and about how "the art of losing isn't hard to master."

Very suitably, "Geography III" feels like a last collection of poetry. Many of the poems are reflective of her own dreams and thoughts, and of her childhood in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts. No looking around in this one, only back -- and in a way, that means the zest is gone from her poetry.

Bishop is still very vivid and observant, describing the red silt and clapboard houses of Canada, the enormity of small things for a little kid, or the "tiny volcanoes" on her tiny island. Some are rambling descriptions of her daily life ("The rackety, icy, offshore wind/numbed our faces on one side/disrupted the formation/of a lone flight of Canada geese..."), given a poignant beauty.

But she also tries out some odder stuff occasionally, such as the charmingly offbeat "One Art ("Lose something every day. Accept the fluster/of lost door keys") or the surreal office battlefields of "12 O'Clock News." And it finishes up with a chilly, early-morning poem about a dog, that ends with, "Yesterday brought to today so lightly!/(A yesterday I find almost impossible to lift)."

"Geography III" was a suitable farewell for a brilliant poet -- lots of vivid imagery, poignant reminiscing, and the occasional quirky little poem about losing keys.

Very god variety of quality poems. A fantastic author!
This book has some very high quality poems. Although all of them are not prize winners, Bishop uses incredible imagery, wording, and rythm to create her piece. I believe that more of Bishop's work should be included in theclassic poetry curiculum. ... Read more

Product Description
Elizabeth Bishop, who constructed poems of crystalline visual accuracy, is often regarded as the most painterly of twentieth-century American poets. In Deep Skin, Peggy Samuels explores Bishop's attraction to painters who experimented with dynamic interactions between surface and depth. She tells the story of the development of Bishop's poetics in relation to her engagement with mid-century art, particularly the work of Paul Klee, Kurt Schwitters, and Alexander Calder. Contemporary conversations about the visual arts circulating among art historians and reviewers shaped Bishop's experience and illuminated aesthetic problems for which she needed to find solutions. The book explores in particular the closest intellectual context for Bishop, her friend Margaret Miller, who worked as a research associate and later associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art.

Samuels traces a complex and rich four-way metaphor in her portrait of Bishop's methods: surface of verse, surface of painting, skin, and interface between mind and world. The visual arts helped Bishop to develop a new model for lyric: the surface of verse becomes a threshold that opens in two directions--to nature and to the interior of the poet. Bishop's poetics is very much about the touch of the materials of the mind and world inside the materiality of verse. Translating and revising some of the concepts from the visual arts in her own linguistic medium, she begins to experiment with modulation, absorption, and incorporation across multiple registers of experience. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (4)

A couple like the Clintons
I'm with Elizabeth, when she snaps at Lowell that writing a good poem isn't worth hurting other people that much. I admit this book's art, and envy others' enjoyment of it, but what if you can't bear Lowell's personality and only read it for EB's sake? Much gnashing of teeth. They remind me eerily of another mismatched power couple, who are fond of each other when apart: Bill and Hilary Clinton. Lowell's sense of his own importance to poetry, which gives him the right to do anything he wishes to lesser mortals, is Bill-Clintonian. Lowell's as reckless, as destructive and self destructive, but also as charming to women. (Who are his profession, as much as poetry is.)It has been said, "Hilary loves Bill; and Bill loves Bill." Why can't such intelligent women see through these charming sociopaths? Think of Arendt and that creep Heidegger. Lowell is always running back to EB, crying like Brando in Streetcar. Difficult for a man to read, but if you're an intelligent woman with EB's weakness for "bad boys," then lady, be my guest.

bedtime reading
This has been my bedtime reading for a month now and what a lovely way to end the day.

They lived apart, continents apart, but close in spirit.Their letters are gossipy, smart, unguarded, critical of each others' work, supportive through triumphs and awful trials.They say things to each other that they never would have voiced aloud.(Sometimes they get catty, and mostly they are right.)

As their careers progress, you follow a poem by poem progression.The letters made me aware of the extent to which their poems were written in response to the work of the other, and the importance of their prose and translation to the poems for which they are now famous.

It's a nice book too, a good design, and a fine thing in hand.My only complaint is that the footnotes (which are fascinating) are printed in a tiny font that's almost too small for my tired eyes.

words in air
I may be regarded as prejudiced but I have long followed the life and poetry of Elizabeth Bishop.This book not only solidified by love of her work but extended it.

Love of Poetry
This correspondence is one long (nearly a thousand pages) love letter between two of the best poets of their generation. Both Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell were personally tortured by their demons (her was alcohol, his was manic-depression) and failed relationships. Though never lovers, their's was a marriage of the minds via the mail for thirty years. It is helpful, though not vital, that the reader be acquainted with their poetry -- the letters have more meaning and one can understand the fuss they had with their written creations. This definiative collection of their letters is a biography of their adult lives. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (25)

Thumbs up
Book arrived on time and in the condition ordered. I'd definitely order from these folks again.

Rediscovering Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop was born in 1911 and died more than 30 years ago in 1979. Along the way, she picked up just about every writing award that's given - the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book critics Circle Award, two Guggenheim fellowships, and a lot more.

I was introduced to her poetry in the mid-1970s, and I "backed" into it. At the time I was reading everything ever written by and about Flannery O'Connor, and she and Bishop had been good friends until O'Connor's death in 1964 of complications from lupus. I reintroduced myself to Bishop's poetry this year, and I'm glad I did.

This volume of her complete poems (including some done at 16 that she might have preferred to remain unpublished) was first issued in 1984. It includes all of the poetry published in her lifetime, either in separate volumes or in magazines and journals. But there's more - the poems from youth, various poems not collected until this volume, the translations of other poets' work from the Portuguese and Spanish, such as Octavio Paz.

The poems cover territory that ranges from the sublime to the mundane (and it doesn't get more mundane that waiting in a dentist's office; see "In the Waiting Room"). Her poems are spare, exhibiting almost a hardness at times, before a certain wryness pulls you back. From "A Cold Spring" (1955):

A cold spring;
the violet was flawed on the lawn.
For two weeks or more the trees hesitated;
the little leaves waited,
carefully indicating their characteristics.
Finally a grave green dust
settled over your bug and aimless hills.
One day, in a chill white blast of sunshine,
on the side of one a calf was born.
The mother stopped lowing
and took a long time eating the after-birth,
a wretched flag,
but the calf got up promptly
and seemed inclined to feel gay.

To read a volume of poems like this one is to read the poet's life. The reader has the benefit of seeing that life collected; the poet, of course, didn't live it that way. But the poems tell us she lived a great life, and a full one, and it is a tribute to the poet that they read as well today as they did when they written40 and 50 and 60 years ago.

I lost this 2 days after receiving it
I bought this book after hearing Cameron Diaz recite one of the poems in the movie 'In her shoes', I brought it to work and someone thought they needed it more than I did.However, the book itself arrived promptly and I was very pleased

the portrait of the artist as a conscientious wordsmith
Shampooing With Liz:
Elizabeth Bishop's Personal Accountability

18 April 2007

Of course, you will discuss his poems--
but talk about his beauty, too,
the delicate beauty we loved.
--C. P. Cavafy
"For Ammonis, Who Died At Twenty-Nine, In 610,"
from The Collected Poems Of C. P. Cavafy:
A New Translation (2006), trans. Aliki Barnstone
_________

Their constitutional inability to talk about gay in any context at all--the editors were men's men--precluded even a pretense of compassion.
--Paul Monette
"Getting Covered," from Last Watch Of The Night: Essays Too Personal And Otherwise (1994)

_________

`Deny deny deny'
-- Elizabeth Bishop
"Roosters," from North & South (1946)

Elizabeth Bishop's complete poetry, that small mound amounting to no more than 300 pages, contains a kind of grandeur and "natural heroism"--a veritable Kilimanjaro in the form of verse. Shy, one-of-a-kind and not very prolific (though she was a prodigious letter writer), Bishop's poetry is remarkable for its sensitivity, wit and a forceful reticence. It is this last quality that I want to discuss in detail.

Against the backdrop of Confessionalism--a literary "movement" with Robert Lowell, a close associate of Bishop's, at the helm--Elizabeth Bishop draws into her personal and unique psyche and a life rife with travels to give relief to a body of work replete with deep feelings. One characteristic that distinguishes Bishop from the confessional poets is, although intimate and personal, her poetry is not marked with messy autobiographical facts that oftentimes colored the works of, say, Lowell 's. Bishop, however, does reveal, to my mind, the accidents that make up her autobiography in subtler ways.

Chief of these accidental facts is her homosexuality. Although Bishop did not care to align herself with sexually, racially and class-based categorizations, especially when it came to her poetry, Bishop is one of our poets who is truly conscious of these issues. (I don't blame her. Trust me--I've had my fill of the R.G.C. [Race Gender Class] police-teachers in college so I understand Bishop's stance.) In light of this, a poet worth her salt naturally knows that every word counts and a wordsmith is instinctively aware of the effects of his employment of a word or phrase--both are conscious and conscientious in their "insidious intent," in their word's worth. And a look at the witty ways evident in her first two books of poems (North & South and A Cold Spring) demonstrate clearly her stealth design.

I found five instances where Bishop employs the word "queer"--

"He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers" ("The Man-Moth")

"queer cupids of all persons getting up" ("Love Lies Sleeping")

"`But that queer sea looks made of wood,
half-shining, like a driftwood sea..." ("The Monument")

"On the east steps the Air Force Band
in uniforms of Air Force blue
is playing hard and loud, but--queer--
the music doesn't quite come through." ("View Of The Capitol
From The Library Of Congress)

"and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves" ("Letter To N.Y.")

--two instances of the word "gay"--

"but the calf got up promptly
and seemed inclined to feel gay." ("A Cold Spring")

"And while the fireflies
are failing to illuminate these nightmare trees
might they not be his green gay eyes." (`III / While Someone Telephones'
from "Four Poems")

--two instances of the word "flit" (I first encountered this word and its "shadow side" (to borrow a funny and smart term Anne Carson uses to describe her modern-day Geryon in her celebrated Autobiography Of Red), from reading The Catcher In The Rye, a book with characters trying to come to grips with their sexuality--

"Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him." ("The Man-Moth")

"Across the floor flits the mechanical toy,
fit for a king of several centuries back" ("Cirque d'Hiver")

--two instances of the term "invert" in its many forms (a consultation with the dictionary reveals the fabulous etymology of this word, with its common meaning of being upside-down, but also an archaic "sexual condition" in the field of psychology [Freud employed this word in his diagnosis again and again], and its Latin root vertere meaning to turn--or, in effect, poetry!)--

"the city grows down into his open eyes
inverted and distorted" ("Love Lies Sleeping")

"So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well
into that world inverted
where left is always right" ("Insomnia")

There must be many other examples where Bishop accounts for her English.

In a recent Writers' Colloquium at The New School, during the question-and-answer period, Paul Muldoon talks about the ways a poet is held liable for the words he uses. His example: If one were to use a word like "skunk", one had better know that word's history.

Though not forthcoming about her personal life, there is no denying that Elizabeth Bishop has done her share of etymological-archeological legwork. On the surface, some of the words she uses, in their various contexts, have a direct meaning to that context. I hope the exhibition above is but a small sample of the poet being aware of not the surfaces but also the multitude of layers a word wears.

Of course, we shall talk about her poems--the beauty, the delicacy that constitute her body of work. But if we are at once deliberative and open, perhaps we may derive an alternative--no, an additional--insight into the complexities of the poems we so cherished?

Jan 2008
I find this work so useful to me. Every mornig I wake up and read a poem, always inspiring and comforting. Elizabeth turns everything to emotions which are a true image of what is reality. ... Read more

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Brett Millier pieces together the compelling and painful story of Bishop's life and traces the writing of her brilliantly crafted poems. ... Read more

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This book brings together the work of pioneering scholars in the field- critics who are exploring the psychosexual tensions within Bishop's vision and the uncanny way her poetics of dislocation challenges our assumptions about placement and orientation. These scholars argue that Bishop's "sense of difference" as an orphan, a woman artist, and a lesbian plays a significant role in the questioning of aesthetic, ethical, and sexual boundaries that is so much a part of her poetic practice. Drawing on central issues of Bishop's personal life, the book considers the ways in which the poet's art confronts the female body, the sexual politics of literary tradition, and the pleasures and perils of language itself.

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Customer Reviews (6)

A Reading Of"(Florida Revisited)?"
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/RCMH56I0V3KNO These previously unpublished poems and essays (exhausively footnoted) indeed do not display the fine craftsmanship of Bishop at her best.But they do reveal the extraordinarily chaotic life of a poet beset by all manner of dire events: bouts of alcoholism, suicides of lovers, relatives dying in madhouses etc. that make it a very gripping read.

I chose this particular poem to read because it best represents these elements in Bishop's life.Her approach to it and herself was extremely sardonic.Indeed, having read all the poems included herein aloud, I find it impossible to get the tone correct without adopting a sardonic, self-mocking manner.It's simply the only plausible way to read these poems.

This is not the best Bishop poem, but it's the most representative of this volume. It reveals the dark side of herself which she hid from the world and did not want us to see.

More interesting than early reviews indicated
Now that this is remaindered, it's safe to pick up a copy.No, it is not a perfect EB collection, but it doesn't claim to be.Any time one delves into the unpublished material of a writer, one knows one is not going to find gold--it's not here.But it sure is interesting stuff.I do wish someone had transcribed rather than reproduced the series of drafts of "One Art."There's real insight into EB's process.

Hidden treasures of a great artist
The question regarding whether to publish the unpublished work of great authors is indeed a vexing one, especially in this case since the poet evidently chose not to release these.
However, just as in the case of the notebooks of great philosophers such as Kant and Nietzsche, one often gleans riches from their fragments. Elizabeth Bishop is a great poet, and there are treasures of all kinds here--images, rhythms, narratives.

Gems from among the leavings
This rather strangely titled book is a tribute to the demand for Elizabeth Bishop's work. It is a set of pieces gleaned from some 3,500 pages in the Vassar College library collection. Not exactly random (but almost) here are 108 poems, some prose, notes she took, some sketches, some facimilies of her papers, some sketches she made, and other pieces harder to describe.

Obviously this is a book that will appeal most to people who are already Elizabeth Bishop fans. This is more of a work in process. It tells more about her as a person, it illustrates the great effort she went to get her poems just right before sending them off for publication. It shows something of the way her mind worked.

The work here is not Ms. Bishop's best. It's unfinished. Some of the shorter pieces, fragments really, make you wonder where she might have taken it.

Please publish Collected Poems in hardcover
This book's availability in hardcover makes the unavailability of Bishop's "Collected Poems 1927-1979" in hardcover hard to fathom. FS&G, please reprint EB's collected poems in hardcover as well as paperback. Thanks. ... Read more

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In Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Travel, Kim Fortuny argues that Bishop's travel poetry reveals a political and social consciousness that, until fairly recently, has largely been seen as absent from her poetry and her life. Fortuny argues that questions of travel bring up questions of form in Bishop’s poems. Moreover, because Bishop knows much about both travel and form, yet is particularly well versed in the latter, Bishop’s poetry sheds light on the ethical and political problems of modern travel from a vantage gained by a scrupulous and hard-won artistry.

Fortuny maintains that there is practical merit in paying close attention to the linguistic complexities of Bishop's poems. The textures of poems concerned with foreign travel—poems such as "Questions of Travel," "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance," "Crusoe in England," and "Santarém"—reveal a consciousness that is fundamentally social, in spite of the writer's reputation for Modernist and ahistorical reserve. Consequently, the heart of this study is a series of close readings of these poems, in which Fortuny teases out the nuances of Bishop's relationship to the world in which she lived and traveled, examining her "apolitical" poems through a political lens and encountering her poetic style as politically engaged itself.

Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Travel will appeal to Bishop scholars, literary scholars, and those with an interest in Modernist poetry. ... Read more

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This is a highly illuminating reader's guide written by another leading poet, who uses letters written by Bishop to herself. ... Read more

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In this book, the first study of Elizabeth Bishop's whole career, Travisano explores her development as an artist. Through sensitive reading of the poems, supported by comparison with Bishop's letters, interviews, stories, memoirs, and critical essays, he defines the traditions that shaped Bishop's introspective early work and the evolution of her later work toward a more public style.

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Read by the Poet
One Cassette, 1 hour

The second installment of our exclusive The Voice of the Poet series, comprised of rare archival recordings, some never before released, featuring the acclaimed Elizabeth Bishop.

This audio production is accompanied by a book containing the text to the poems and a commentary by J.D. McClatchy.Amazon.com Review
In her readings, Elizabeth Bishop extended what James Merrill termed her"instinctive, modest, life-long impersonation of an ordinary woman."Eschewing the grandiosity--the extended pauses for effect, the statelyself-wonder--that could strike her contemporaries and seems epidemic amongher descendants, she opted for a brisk clip. In fact, in "The Map," whichopens The Voice of the Poet, she sounds as if she can't wait toescape New York's 92nd Street Y. The collection includes 23 poems from sixdifferent readings, the first taking place on October 17, 1947, and the last30 years later, when she was clearly congested. It is also accompanied by abooklet containing a fine essay by J.D. McClatchy and the poems themselves.

Bishop offers few remarks, so each one, along with eachslight alteration of text, is precious. For example, she brings "Large BadPicture" to a sudden, marvelous halt with "And I must change that--he neverwas a schoolteacher. I think I liked the rhyme." She is in finest form atthe Coolidge Auditorium in May 1969, and particularly loose with the magical"Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore." Perhaps this has something to do withits vocative mode and its irresistible repetition of "please come flying":"We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping, / or play at a game ofconstantly being wrong / with a priceless set of vocabularies, / or we canbravely deplore, but please / please come flying."

Despite Bishop's attempts at invisibility, her art again and again makesitself felt. One is grateful that she was caught narrating such masterworksas "At the Fishhouses" and "The Moose" as well as the lovely "Poem" about aminiature painting, with its "tiny cows, / two brushstrokes each, butconfidently cows" and celebrated riddle: "A specklike bird is flying to theleft. / Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird?" The tape also includes suchlesser-known pieces as "Cirque d'Hiver." Only Bishop could instill awind-up horse and rider with such desperate beauty, wit, and desire forconnection:

His mane and tail are straight from Chirico
He has a formal, melancholy soul.
He feels her pink toes dangle toward his back
along the little pole
that pierces both her body and her soul

and goes through his, and reappears below,
under his belly, as a big tin key.

Customer Reviews (3)

a Treat!
i bought this tape on a road trip and logged the miles spellbound by howBishop's voice and inflection turned the poems I blew through in collegeinto delightful, insightful stories.This tape, and i'll bet the others inthis series, is an example of why poetry needs to be heard, rather thanread.Send these tapes to schools everywhere!

Essential Elizabeth Bishop, but not for the newcomer...
Elizabeth Bishop disliked the sound of her own voice, and often refused to permit recordings (even private ones) of her readings.Bishop's executor, Alice Methfessel, respected the poet's keen protective instincts, andallowed no commercial issue in the two decades since Bishop's death.As aresult, the speaking voice of this great poet has remained a mystery, evenas Bishop's following and reputation has grown by bounds.

I stillremember the shock of hearing Bishop's voice for the first time. Bishop'svoice is so -- I don't know any other word for it -- so ordinary.This isas true on her early recordings (from the late 1940s) as on her maturereadings (mid 1970s).At times, the listener is tempted to think she doesnot understand the meaning of what she is saying: she is so shy aboutdrawing attention to her poetic craft, and so embarrassed about revealingany hidden emotional content, that she almost seems to be reading the workof another person."Don't you realize," I want to shout,"that you are speaking some of the greatest lines in Americanpoetry?"But we must remember that Bishop's self-effacements, howeverineffective in a public reading, are part of the reason why her poems areso emotionally satisfying.Meaning and memory resonate in the most lightlyobserved surface details.

I would highly recommend this recording toanyone who already knows Elizabeth Bishop's work and biography -- it is anexcellent reference, even if it is not the most entertaining recording.However, I would caution a newcomer to Bishop NOT to start here.It is farbetter to read the poems and the letters first so that you have a sense ofthe many masks this poet wears. Another good place to start is thehour-long documentary on Elizabeth Bishop in the "Voices andVisions" series, which appeared years ago on public television(available in many libraries).James Merrill and Mary McCarthy areinterviewed about their friendship with Elizabeth Bishop and make manyilluminating comments.Blythe Danner -- Gwyneth Paltrow's mom! -- readsthe poems of Bishop, and frankly does a better job of it than Bishop does.

Bishop converses...
The Bishop on this tape is a surprise.She reads easily, congenially, interrupts herself to comment on what she's doing.She's funny, and the humor that's under the surface of the poems gets to bubble up at oddmoments.It's a great selection of poems, and it's fantastically handy tohave the booklet of the texts of the poems (some of which are interestinglydifferent from the versions Bishop reads) tucked into the pocket in thefront of the elegant package.J.D. McClatchy's introduction to her workis, as always, illuminating. ... Read more