Poems

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 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.

This new edition offers readers the opportunity to take in, entire, one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry. 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.

Praise

Praise for Elizabeth Bishop:

 

"Of all the splendid and curious works belonging to my time, these are poems that I love best and tire of least. And there will be no others."—James Merrill, The Washington Post Book World

"Bishop was one of the finest poets this country produced in [the twentieth] century; we are lucky to have all her work collected now in one volume."—Jane Howard, Mademoiselle

"Bishop was not just a good poet but a great one. She accomplished a magical illumination of the ordinary, forcing us to examine our surroundings with the freshness of a friendly alien."—David Lehman, Newsweek

"With their wit, honesty, abundance, imaginative breadth, and prosodic grace . . . thirty or forty of the poems in this book seem as valuable as any written in English since the last war."—Christopher Reid, The Sunday Times (London)

About the Author(s)

Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop (1911–79) won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

photo: Joseph Breitenbach

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