The Centenary Edition

Poems

The definitive edition of the work of one of America's greatest poets.

One of the greatest poets of the twentieth century

When we read her, we enter the classical serenity of a new country

If ever there was a poet whose every scrap of writing should be in print, that poet must be Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911 and graduated from Vassar College in 1934. She travelled widely as an adult, living in Paris, Mexico, New York, Florida, and, for more than a decade, Brazil, before returning to the United States. Her work was immediately prized for its distinctive clarity, precision, and depth, and she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, among others. She died in Boston in 1979.

This is the definitive centenary edition of the work of one of America's greatest poets, recognised today as a master of her art and acclaimed by poets and readers alike. Her poems display honesty and humour, grief and acceptance, observing nature and human nature with painstaking accuracy. They often start outwardly, with geography and landscape - from New England and Nova Scotia, where Bishop grew up, to Florida and Brazil, where she later lived - and move inexorably toward the interior, exploring questions of knowledge and perception, love and solitude, and the ability or inability of form to control chaos. 
 
This new edition, edited by Saskia Hamilton, includes Bishop's four published volumes (North &amp; South, A Cold Spring, Questions of Travel and Geography III), as well as uncollected poems, translations and an illuminating selection of unpublished manuscript poems, reproduced in facsimile, revealing exactly how finished, or unfinished, Bishop left them. It offers readers the opportunity to enjoy the complete poems of one of the most distinguished American poets of the twentieth century.

Elizabeth Bishop

The virtues of the prose are the virtues of the poems: observation, wit, decorum, a sinuous intelligence adn above all what Randall Jarrell called her 'moral attractiveness'

Unhurried, methodical, human, she pronounces a true but merciful verdict on our precarious existence

[Bishop] was also a fine writer of prose...So hats off to the publishers for gathering all her writings in two separate volumes...her cosmopolitan life is reflected in the breadth of her writings, all suffused with curiosity and quiet intelligence

Taken together [with the Poems: The Centenary Edition], these two volumes make a handsome tribute to a writer who is gradually, quietly being recognized...as one of America's greatest

Although Elizabeth Bishop is perhaps better known as a masterful poet, she was a dazzling and compelling prose writer too, as this centenary edition of her prose demonstrates. From her witty, unforgettable portraits of Marianne Moore and the Sitwells to her engaging childhood recollections of Canada and Massachusetts, her writing reflects a lifelong fascination with memory and travel, and her unique eye and ear for people and places. 
 
This new volume - edited by the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Lloyd Schwartz - includes virtually all her published shorter prose pieces and a number of prose works not published until after her death. Included here are her stories, crucial memoirs, literary and travel essays, book reviews, and - for the first time - the original draft of Brazil, the Life World Library volume she repudiated in its published version, as well as extensive selections from the correspondence between Bishop and the poet Anne Stevenson. Here is a rich and revealing selection, and the indispensible companion to the poems.

Elizabeth Bishop

Praise for Prose

The virtues of the prose are the virtues of the poems: observation, wit, decorum, a sinuous intelligence adn above all what Randall Jarrell called her 'moral attractiveness'

Unhurried, methodical, human, she pronounces a true but merciful verdict on our precarious existence

[Bishop] was also a fine writer of prose...So hats off to the publishers for gathering all her writings in two separate volumes...her cosmopolitan life is reflected in the breadth of her writings, all suffused with ...

The virtues of the prose are the virtues of the poems: observation, wit, decorum, a sinuous intelligence adn above all what Randall Jarrell called her 'moral attractiveness'

Unhurried, methodical, human, she pronounces a true but merciful verdict on our precarious existence

[Bishop] was also a fine writer of prose...So hats off to the publishers for gathering all her writings in two separate volumes...her cosmopolitan life is reflected in the breadth of her writings, all suffused with ...

The virtues of the prose are the virtues of the poems: observation, wit, decorum, a sinuous intelligence adn above all what Randall Jarrell called her 'moral attractiveness'

Unhurried, methodical, human, she pronounces a true but merciful verdict on our precarious existence

[Bishop] was also a fine writer of prose...So hats off to the publishers for gathering all her writings in two separate volumes...her cosmopolitan life is reflected in the breadth of her writings, all suffused with ...

Books by Elizabeth Bishop

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