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Poems / Prose [Boxed Set]
This edition of Elizabeth Bishop's Poems / Prose offers readers the opportunity to take in, entire, one of the great careers in twentieth century poetry.
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. PROSE
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 volume―edited by the poet, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, and Bishop scholar Lloyd Schwartz―includes 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, and―for the first time―her 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.
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. PROSE
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 volume―edited by the poet, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, and Bishop scholar Lloyd Schwartz―includes 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, and―for the first time―her 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.
896 pages, Hardcover
First published February 14, 2008
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1136 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth Bishop
142 books590 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and writer from Worcester, Massachusetts. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956. and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. She is considered one of the most important and distinguished American poets of the 20th century.
Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and writer from Worcester, Massachusetts. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956. and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. She is considered one of the most important and distinguished American poets of the 20th century.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
September 17, 2024
For some reason I just can't seem to get enough of the writing of Elizabeth Bishop. This is a book I've been reading, off and on again, for well over a year. It's a book of about 900 pages that has just about everything Bishop wrote, including all of her poems, her short stories, her essays and a wide assortment of literary statements and letters. I had already read almost all of the poems in a book of her collected poetry but reread them anyway. I had, also, read many of the essays before but enjoyed reading them again as well. I, especially, enjoy reading her essays, which read almost like her poetry, and some of the ones I liked most are:
On Being Alone - This essay asks why do we fear being alone when so many good things can be said about it.
Gregorio Valdes - About an old very tiny and sickly man who was a painter. She had commissioned him to paint a picture of her house. Although he spoke very little English she became good friends with him until he died.
A New Capital, Huxley and Indians - A great little story about Bishop meeting up with Aldous Huxley and his wife along with a few other people in Brasilia and then briefly going to a remote Indian village. This took place shortly after the founding of Brasilia and she describes the city in its early stages when it was far from the modern city it is now.
The U.S.A. School of Writing - After she graduated from Vassar in 1934 Bishop went to work for the U.S.A. school of Writing which was a correspondence school. One of the requirements was that she had to go under the name of Fred G. Margolies, who had been an instructor many years before. Her tale was rather humorous when she talked about how horrendous the correspondence students were and their total lack of writing skills that almost all of them had.
On Being Alone - This essay asks why do we fear being alone when so many good things can be said about it.
Gregorio Valdes - About an old very tiny and sickly man who was a painter. She had commissioned him to paint a picture of her house. Although he spoke very little English she became good friends with him until he died.
A New Capital, Huxley and Indians - A great little story about Bishop meeting up with Aldous Huxley and his wife along with a few other people in Brasilia and then briefly going to a remote Indian village. This took place shortly after the founding of Brasilia and she describes the city in its early stages when it was far from the modern city it is now.
The U.S.A. School of Writing - After she graduated from Vassar in 1934 Bishop went to work for the U.S.A. school of Writing which was a correspondence school. One of the requirements was that she had to go under the name of Fred G. Margolies, who had been an instructor many years before. Her tale was rather humorous when she talked about how horrendous the correspondence students were and their total lack of writing skills that almost all of them had.
April 18, 2015
A friend of mine recently divulged his personal favorite among Bishop’s poems, "The End of March," which I immediately sought out, the end of March bearing some significance to me, now. I’d always thought of Elizabeth Bishop as a short story writer, and having sought out the Library of America edition of her collected poems, prose, and letters, I discover that I like best of all her essays, which read to me like her poems must read to others. Her essays are the real thing—life--in color, with context, in language as carefully chosen as any of her poems. She manages to pick among the all the true things in an experience for particular words which tell us volumes…she was a careful curator of the authentic, one with a true artist’s eye.
Bishop has a fearful darkness at the core of her writing. I don’t know why—it almost seems as though she must have an illness that tired her and reminded her how close nothingness is. I did not read any biography of her; perhaps I should. Why it is that poets can make blackness blacker than any other artists, I could not say. But even in her short stories, for instance "The Last Animal," there is an air of menace, a whiff of death. In the essay, "Gregorio Valdes, 1879-1939" we know right from the title that the character we read about is dead, or will die, as it happened. We had forgotten that at the promising start, all hot sun and bright flowers, the shade of palms and the act of creation (paintings) make us forget that death is waiting, and not patiently.
The poem, "The End of March," it shouldn’t surprise us, is also about death. Walking along the beach with a cold biting wind freezing one side of the face, the walkers come upon a "man-sized" tangle of kite string "but no kite" washed up on the shore. At the same time, one walker glimpses a boarded-up beach house tethered by a wire (electricity?) to something off beyond the dunes. The walker imagines a retirement there,
Robert Pinsky was asked just recently in The New Yorker poetry podcast to choose a poem to read from the New Yorker archives and he chose a Bishop poem first published in that magazine in 1947. Called “At the Fishhouses,” the poem Pinsky calls "plain" has something of the “cold dark deep and absolutely clear” description that she reprises more than once.
As it often happens in the way of things, Colm Tóibín has recently published a book with Princeton University Press, On Elizabeth Bishop, whom he has been reading for forty years. Tóibín shares his thoughts on Elizabeth Bishop and the poet Thom Gunn in this article in The Guardian. Also in The Guardian, Lavinia Greenlaw reviews Tóibín's new book. Each of these yields great insights into Bishop's life and style.
Bishop has a fearful darkness at the core of her writing. I don’t know why—it almost seems as though she must have an illness that tired her and reminded her how close nothingness is. I did not read any biography of her; perhaps I should. Why it is that poets can make blackness blacker than any other artists, I could not say. But even in her short stories, for instance "The Last Animal," there is an air of menace, a whiff of death. In the essay, "Gregorio Valdes, 1879-1939" we know right from the title that the character we read about is dead, or will die, as it happened. We had forgotten that at the promising start, all hot sun and bright flowers, the shade of palms and the act of creation (paintings) make us forget that death is waiting, and not patiently.
The poem, "The End of March," it shouldn’t surprise us, is also about death. Walking along the beach with a cold biting wind freezing one side of the face, the walkers come upon a "man-sized" tangle of kite string "but no kite" washed up on the shore. At the same time, one walker glimpses a boarded-up beach house tethered by a wire (electricity?) to something off beyond the dunes. The walker imagines a retirement there,
"....doing nothing,
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:
look through binoculars, read boring books,
old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,
talk to myself, and, foggy days,
watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light."
Robert Pinsky was asked just recently in The New Yorker poetry podcast to choose a poem to read from the New Yorker archives and he chose a Bishop poem first published in that magazine in 1947. Called “At the Fishhouses,” the poem Pinsky calls "plain" has something of the “cold dark deep and absolutely clear” description that she reprises more than once.
"…I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
Slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
Icily free above the stones…
…It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
Dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
Drawn from the cold hard mouth
Of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
Forever, flowing and drawn, and since
Our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown."
As it often happens in the way of things, Colm Tóibín has recently published a book with Princeton University Press, On Elizabeth Bishop, whom he has been reading for forty years. Tóibín shares his thoughts on Elizabeth Bishop and the poet Thom Gunn in this article in The Guardian. Also in The Guardian, Lavinia Greenlaw reviews Tóibín's new book. Each of these yields great insights into Bishop's life and style.
June 10, 2015
Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) wasn’t just a major 20th-century American poet, she also wrote short stories, reviewed other authors for magazines, carried on years of intense correspondence with other major figures, and had a fascinating personal life full of ups and downs. This Library of America volume offers us a very nearly complete poetic output along with an ample sampling of her other writings. There’s a chronology of her 68 years on earth too, walking us through a fascinating life that spanned the whole Eastern Seaboard, Paris, South America, and other exotic travels.
We get here the 4 major collections of poetry that Bishop published, along with some uncollected poems. North and South was published in 1946, but most of the poems predate the war (or at least American involvement in it) and reflect Bishop’s development as a poet through the 1930s and very early 1940s. From the very first poem, “The Map”, we find Bishop’s distinctive concern with describing specific scenes in detail, that then give way to some kind of universal, transcendental experience. After various musings on the printers’ layout of the eponymous map, the poem ends:
The second collection, A Cold Spring, consists of poems written in the 1940s and early 1950s. Here too we find Bishop’s careful eye for detail, basing a whole poem on a pensive contemplation of one small object or scene, but it also includes a number of striking poems based on turbulent personal relationships. “O Breath” and “Insomnia” are nighttime meditations on problems with a lover. “View of the Capitol of the Library of Congress” is an amusing jab at politics from a literary intellectual. Some of the poems in A Cold Spring are among my favourite English-language poems, but it’s a pity that in a review one cannot quote at length those many lines that have so touched your heart.
A major change in Bishop’s poetry comes with her third collection, Questions of Travel, and continues with the fourth, Geography III. In 1951, Bishop moved to Brazil after kindling a relationship with the architect Lota de Macedo Soares. Suddenly her poetry abounds in references to South America, lending it an exotic quality and setting her quite apart from her peers left in the US. However, one is struck by how Bishop is still haunted by her New England and Nova Scotian upbringing. I must admit to overall disappointment with these latter two collections, as the poetry is no longer perfectly focused gems, instead taking on a rambling quality. Bishop was an alcoholic, an affliction that only increased during these years, and one wonders if drink is to blame for her declining powers. Still, there are still a handful of strong poems here.
Bishop was a very deliberate, self-critical poet and she produced only about 80 poems. So the bulk of this volume is the other material, such as translations from Portuguese and brief prose pieces. Those aware of how vast Bishop’s epistolary engagement was may feel dissatisfied with the limited selection of letters here, but I think it is a great sampler, and if one is intrigued, then one can move on to e.g. the complete correspondence with Robert Lowell. I enjoyed the more detailed portrait of the poet we get from these letters, for instance, this rich girl’s early attempts at a steady job, her interest in 20th-century modernist classical music, the difficulties of being an expat.
Like all Library of America volumes, this is printed on high-quality paper with a durable binding. I got this book a few years ago and have read it intensively, and it still looks almost the same as when it first arrived. Considering how affordable it is even with that quality production, this deserves to be the standard introduction to Bishop’s poetry, and I can recommend it to poetry lovers in general.
We get here the 4 major collections of poetry that Bishop published, along with some uncollected poems. North and South was published in 1946, but most of the poems predate the war (or at least American involvement in it) and reflect Bishop’s development as a poet through the 1930s and very early 1940s. From the very first poem, “The Map”, we find Bishop’s distinctive concern with describing specific scenes in detail, that then give way to some kind of universal, transcendental experience. After various musings on the printers’ layout of the eponymous map, the poem ends:
Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,
lending the land their waves’ own conformation:
and Norway’s hare runs south in agitation,
profiles investigate the sea, where land is.
Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?
– What suits the characters or the native waters best.
Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.
More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.
The second collection, A Cold Spring, consists of poems written in the 1940s and early 1950s. Here too we find Bishop’s careful eye for detail, basing a whole poem on a pensive contemplation of one small object or scene, but it also includes a number of striking poems based on turbulent personal relationships. “O Breath” and “Insomnia” are nighttime meditations on problems with a lover. “View of the Capitol of the Library of Congress” is an amusing jab at politics from a literary intellectual. Some of the poems in A Cold Spring are among my favourite English-language poems, but it’s a pity that in a review one cannot quote at length those many lines that have so touched your heart.
A major change in Bishop’s poetry comes with her third collection, Questions of Travel, and continues with the fourth, Geography III. In 1951, Bishop moved to Brazil after kindling a relationship with the architect Lota de Macedo Soares. Suddenly her poetry abounds in references to South America, lending it an exotic quality and setting her quite apart from her peers left in the US. However, one is struck by how Bishop is still haunted by her New England and Nova Scotian upbringing. I must admit to overall disappointment with these latter two collections, as the poetry is no longer perfectly focused gems, instead taking on a rambling quality. Bishop was an alcoholic, an affliction that only increased during these years, and one wonders if drink is to blame for her declining powers. Still, there are still a handful of strong poems here.
Bishop was a very deliberate, self-critical poet and she produced only about 80 poems. So the bulk of this volume is the other material, such as translations from Portuguese and brief prose pieces. Those aware of how vast Bishop’s epistolary engagement was may feel dissatisfied with the limited selection of letters here, but I think it is a great sampler, and if one is intrigued, then one can move on to e.g. the complete correspondence with Robert Lowell. I enjoyed the more detailed portrait of the poet we get from these letters, for instance, this rich girl’s early attempts at a steady job, her interest in 20th-century modernist classical music, the difficulties of being an expat.
Like all Library of America volumes, this is printed on high-quality paper with a durable binding. I got this book a few years ago and have read it intensively, and it still looks almost the same as when it first arrived. Considering how affordable it is even with that quality production, this deserves to be the standard introduction to Bishop’s poetry, and I can recommend it to poetry lovers in general.
xx-dnf-skim-reference
October 6, 2020I don't have the time to do more than sample now... but I must admit that most seems beyond me. I rather liked "Insomnia" but I have a feeling I'm grasping for the easy interpretation and if I read more deeply it'd make an entirely different interpretation. I also liked the one about the owl who proves he can count, because he repeats himself in phrases of five, over and over again... but unfortunately I didn't mark it & don't remember where in the volume it was. Anyway, I doubt I'll read more by her unless she is rec'd to me afresh.
Read
April 16, 2023love bishop’s poems love how you’re reading a nice nature description or something and then she hits you with the most jarring and unsettling line ever (i mean this genuinely)
*not rated but i enjoyed it*
*not rated but i enjoyed it*
March 23, 2023
God, she was so brilliant. The standout poems for me were 'One Art', 'In the Waiting Room', and 'The Fish'. I remember coming across 'One Art' for GCSE English Literature, and it hits so much harder in your 20s. The last stanza ends with:
Too good. The villanelle form is inexorable and requires her to deliver the very last line, mirroring how you must go through life dealing with loss, and then somehow heal from it. Or maybe I'm just a little sad.
It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Too good. The villanelle form is inexorable and requires her to deliver the very last line, mirroring how you must go through life dealing with loss, and then somehow heal from it. Or maybe I'm just a little sad.
November 4, 2011
She lived an itinerant life. Bishop came from a wealthy family, so she could afford to travel, and she did, often. Even though he made her home in Brazil for fifteen years, she used that home as a base to travel from, never seeming to stay in one place for too long. She also lived for many years in writers’ haven Key West. Bishop was an alcoholic. So many writers from her generation became alcoholics that it’s hard not to wonder if the true results of Prohibition were to grain-alcohol poison everyone. Because people certainly didn’t stop drinking, they drank home-distiller versions of liquor that were probably many times more potent than what we drink now. And they were drinking mostly alcohol, not a recreational Chardonnay.
My full review - http://xoxoxoe.blogspot.com/2011/03/t...
My full review - http://xoxoxoe.blogspot.com/2011/03/t...
December 16, 2018
perfeito, sem defeitos! quer o mundo, elizabeth? ele já é seu
September 12, 2025
My Elizabeth Bishop, the one that drew me to this magnificent collection, is the woman that spent decades in Brazil, city and countryside, and caught the flavor of a world both savage and beautiful, a land of hard contrasts where the only continuity is poverty and the inventiveness of her people. Not that these elements are missing in the poems set in her native New England. All of Bishop's poems are a kind of step ladder. She begins with one word, thought, or image and involves us in the search for the next juste mot. The whole world becomes a collage in her hands. The selected letters and prose pieces are testimony to her roller coaster life, loves, and growing reputation. Truman Capote was one devoted fan, and Ezra Pound welcomed her to his inner sanctum at St. Elizabeth's asylum in Washington, D.C. Bishop was a poet deeply engaged with her times, and two homelands.
July 27, 2020
Elizabeth Bishop is rightly known for her poetry, and her prose is delightful.
She is to be honored for avoiding “confessional” poetry, which must have been a challenge for her given the drama in her life. Perhaps her reticence reflects on her New England heritage, or perhaps she simply chose to keep her personal life to herself.
She is to be honored for avoiding “confessional” poetry, which must have been a challenge for her given the drama in her life. Perhaps her reticence reflects on her New England heritage, or perhaps she simply chose to keep her personal life to herself.
May 12, 2025
I love Bishop. She didn’t try hard to become a writer, it just came natural. She made poetry into not always a deep message, but a reminder that writing sometimes is just a hobby to speak your mind. She’s great 10/10
January 26, 2020
Bishop, what's not to love!
March 22, 2020
Bishop's poems were recommended to me to read. I didn't care for them, but did not read them all.
April 1, 2020
Beautiful poetry - one of my favorites and most unforgettable being Insomnia.
August 28, 2021
genuinely amazing
November 9, 2024
what can I say that hasn’t already been worshipped?
November 12, 2025
This was the first Library of America Volume of somebody's work which I've read in full. Until now, they had seemed a bit daunting and I feared that a small portion of the author's work would be worth reading, leaving me to thumb through 800 other pages of dry prose, usually left unpublished.
I can't speak to the validity of that fear with anyone except Bishop, but in her case, this volume was thoroughly entertaining the whole way through. I probably finished it in two weeks, and in those two weeks, I've built what feels like a professional relationship with Bishop. I have the feeling, that is to say, of knowing her, but not in the personal sense one means when talking about a friend. In Bishop, you always have the sense of her keeping you at arms length, but she's so deliciously talented, one doesn't care if she writes about someone else's life, even if it's less tragic and dramatic than her own.
Since Bishop is regarded by many as one of the best poets of the 20th century, I won't comment too lengthily on her poems, but they were all very good (of course!) and there aren't very many to get through. The real surprise in this volume appears in the body of her prose work, elegantly styled and performed with the same class of detail for which her poems are usually praised. Even so, there is a clear progression from early work to later pieces in both her short stories, essays, and reviews. The essays start getting very good around the time she published "The Country Mouse," the stories with "Was It in His Hand?," and her literary statements and reviews, most markedly with "It All Depends." "Efforts of Affection," a long piece of writing reminiscing about her experiences with the great poet Marianne Moore, is a highlight for this volume, but nuts and bolts, the letters steal the show since they combine her greatest strength--raw descriptive insight--while attenuating a slight weakness, her impersonal distance.
I can't speak to the validity of that fear with anyone except Bishop, but in her case, this volume was thoroughly entertaining the whole way through. I probably finished it in two weeks, and in those two weeks, I've built what feels like a professional relationship with Bishop. I have the feeling, that is to say, of knowing her, but not in the personal sense one means when talking about a friend. In Bishop, you always have the sense of her keeping you at arms length, but she's so deliciously talented, one doesn't care if she writes about someone else's life, even if it's less tragic and dramatic than her own.
Since Bishop is regarded by many as one of the best poets of the 20th century, I won't comment too lengthily on her poems, but they were all very good (of course!) and there aren't very many to get through. The real surprise in this volume appears in the body of her prose work, elegantly styled and performed with the same class of detail for which her poems are usually praised. Even so, there is a clear progression from early work to later pieces in both her short stories, essays, and reviews. The essays start getting very good around the time she published "The Country Mouse," the stories with "Was It in His Hand?," and her literary statements and reviews, most markedly with "It All Depends." "Efforts of Affection," a long piece of writing reminiscing about her experiences with the great poet Marianne Moore, is a highlight for this volume, but nuts and bolts, the letters steal the show since they combine her greatest strength--raw descriptive insight--while attenuating a slight weakness, her impersonal distance.
March 25, 2011
This has been on my "reading" shelf for a long time, but I think there are respectable reasons for that. First, it is the complete collection of Elizabeth Bishop's life works, and that deserves a considered time for perusal. Second, she is a poet of the first magnitude so she is not read easily or quickly. Third, her poetry is magnetizing, so that while I was reading her prose & letters, I would dip back into the poetry and I would say at a conservative estimate that I read most of it two to three or more times, by the time I finished the bible-papered fat volume. And, four, Bishop spoke personally to me because I found in surprise, that I write very much in her school in many ways, a discovery that made me all the more attached to her works. Now I was reading as a would-be writer reads an idol on a pedestal, learning at every turn. Such a surprise to find that what you thought was just your own idiosyncratic way with words turns out to be a respected "manner." It gave me the shivers. That being said, I'll take a step back and say that she is accessible and entrancing and if you like poetry you shouldn't miss her. Give the earliest poems a miss, she was just getting her feet under her, but from her second collection on she is a joy.
February 28, 2016
This Library of America edition of Elizabeth Bishop opened up to me the impressive scope of her works: collected and uncollected poetry, essays, reminiscences from childhood, travel writing (she lived in Brazil for about 15 years), translations, and letters to established poets of the time: Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell. As one familiar mainly with an impressive poem or two from anthologies (Roosters for example), I really enjoyed experiencing the full scope of her creativity. She was born (1911) and died (1979) in Massachusetts, and in between lived in Nova Scotia, Manhattan, Brazil and Maine; among the favorites for me were her recollections of childhood (Memories of Uncle Neddy, Gwendolyn, and the sort of prose poem In the Waiting Room); poetry and essays mainly of her many years in Brazil; and all those poems I had never gotten around to reading before. Bishop was not much for metaphor and flights of fancy…in all of her work there is a sort of clear distillation from deep observation of whatever happened to surround her that is clean and impressive. The Library of America is in itself a treasure: here we have a nicely bound (and sized) book; a chronology of Bishop’s life; and biographical and textual notes which add greatly to the reading experience.
May 10, 2016
Let me start off by saying that I ordered this for about 60 dollars less than the cover price, and it came in perfect condition, so that was nice. I am not a big fan of Bishop's prose writing; I think, perhaps, that her poetry has overshadowed her prose in my mind. The poetry volume provides something that makes this set really worthwhile: manuscript facsimiles of some of Bishop's unpublished poetry. These unseen pieces are not at all remarkable which is not to say anything diminishing of Bishop as a writer, her poetry (published, that is) is remarkable. Her 'Sestina' is the greatest I have ever read, and it quite overshadows that "sestina" Ezra Pound wrote. It is important to me as a writer and future teacher that we be able to see some of the unknown work, the cast aside pieces, to show that we are all struggling to produce excellent or worthy content. This set is nice because you get all of Bishop, all, that is, that you need. I highly recommend if you can get this cheaply, as I did, that you buy it. There are paperback versions of the two volumes as well, though, and those are just as fine.
Read
January 19, 2010"My maternal grandmother had a glass eye. It fascinated me as a child, and the idea of it has fascinated me all my life. She was religious, in the Puritanical Protestant sense and didn't believe in looking into mirrors very much. Quite often the glass eye looked heavenward, or off at an angle, while the real eye looked at you.
'Him whose happie birth
Taught me to live here so, that still one eye
Should aim and shoot at that which is on high.'
"Off and on I have written out a poem called 'Grandmother's Glass Eye' which should be about the modern problem of writing poetry. The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of the poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye."
-in "Writing Poetry..."
'Him whose happie birth
Taught me to live here so, that still one eye
Should aim and shoot at that which is on high.'
"Off and on I have written out a poem called 'Grandmother's Glass Eye' which should be about the modern problem of writing poetry. The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of the poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye."
-in "Writing Poetry..."
August 24, 2014
I was reading through some Anne Sexton poetry about a year ago. She wasn't really speaking to me at that time. So I picked up an anthology of women poets in our library and fell head over feet with Bishop's work. So naturally after devouring her poems and her book One Art , I had to go buy this book of her poems, prose and letters. She never fails to impress me. In each bit of work I find a gem. Whether it's on a fishing boat or how stranded she may feel in love, each written piece speaks to me. I finished this book in two weeks time never once watching TV or movies.For two weeks Elizabeth Bishop kept me enthralled. Maybe this fall I can try Sexton with better results?
April 12, 2022
While I’m currently close reading and studying her poetry and prose, Bishop’s writing is so depressing and just boring that I have a hard time connecting with her work. Maybe it’s because I’m used to Romantic/Victorian Era poetry filled with themes of feminism, romance, falleness, and the pastoral, Bishop’s work just doesn’t cut it for me.
Read
July 9, 2010Though this is a more expensive collection of Bishop’s work, it is well worth it. The book offers a complete collection of her poems in chronological order, as well as her letters many of them to Robert Lowell, which are informative in not only understanding her aesthetics, but also her outlook on many of her contemporaries.
October 31, 2018
One of the best writer who can manipulate and accommodate the words with complexity is Bishop.
Frankly, I love reading her writings because of the ambiguity and the way she probe various aspects of life with simple vocabularies. Moreover, her writings reminds me of the different interpretations that I used to write about 20 years ago...
Frankly, I love reading her writings because of the ambiguity and the way she probe various aspects of life with simple vocabularies. Moreover, her writings reminds me of the different interpretations that I used to write about 20 years ago...
April 25, 2011
The POEMS volume is excellent. Ms Bishop won many major awards including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. This book presents a selection from her many books and concludes with manuscripts which were unfinished at the time of her death.
February 9, 2013
Just dabbling in this, but really enjoy learning about Ms. Bishop's life and reading her refreshing words.
October 1, 2008
Always on my nightstand, it's become a favorite nearly every night. Her poems are always fresh and thoughtful. I like her sense of humor as well.
January 2, 2010
Best body of work I have ever read. Elizabeth Bishop was complex, her writing simple.
Utterly absorbing and fantastic. Yes, it is that good.
Utterly absorbing and fantastic. Yes, it is that good.
December 18, 2014
I love "The Fish"
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