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 / Prose [Boxed Set]

Literature & Fiction

Bishop, Elizabeth

United States

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

The quality of Elizabeth Bishop's prose is as distinctive and personal as that of her poems. This rich collection, compiled by her editor, Robert Giroux, is arranged in two parts, fiction and nonfiction.

Collected Prose: Elizabeth Bishop

Translated poems of 2 Brazilian poets, Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Joao Cabral de Melo Neto, and original poems comprise 3 decades of the author's work

The Complete Poems

Poetry

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments

From the mid-1930s to 1978 Elizabeth Bishop published some eighty poems and thirty translations. Yet her notebooks reveal that she embarked upon many more compositions, some existing in only fragmentary form and some embodied in extensive drafts. Edgar Allen Poe &amp; The Juke-Box presents, alongside facsimiles of many notebook pages from which they are drawn, poems Bishop began soon after college, reflecting her passion for Elizabethan verse and surrealist technique; love poems and dream fragments from the 1940s; poems about her Canadian childhood; and many other works that heretofore have been quoted almost exclusively in biographical and critical studies.
This revelatory and moving selection brings us into the poet's laboratory, showing us the initial provocative images that moved her to begin a poem, illustrating terrain unexplored in the work published during her lifetime. Editor Alice Quinn has also mined the Bishop archives for rich tangential material that illuminates the poet's sources and intentions.

Exchanging Hats: Paintings

Thought not many people know it, Elizabeth Bishop painted throughout her life, as this handsome book, reproducing in full color forty of her watercolors, demonstrates. Benton gives the provenance, dimensions, and (where possible) the date of each painting; he also cites painterly passages from Bishop's writing.\nAmazon.com Review\nElizabeth Bishop was a great poet. It turns out that she was also a rather good painter, even though she insisted that her paintings were anything but art. Her visual creations offer intimate and unexpected insights into the magic of familiar places and beloved friends. 
Exchanging Hats provides both veteran Bishop admirers and those meeting her for the first time with an extraordinary examination of her paintings and drawings.\nFrom Publishers Weekly\nIt is not widely known that the poet Elizabeth Bishop was also a painter. "From time to time I paint a small gouache or watercolor and give them to friends. They are Not Art?NOT AT ALL," she declared in 1971. Exchanging Hats collects 30 of Bishop's modest, graceful, sometimes primitive images of friends, flowers, landscapes, buildings and domestic interiors, edited and introduced by poet William Benton and accompanied by short, painterly excerpts from Bishop's prose writings on art and poetry. 
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.\nFrom Booklist\nNo one familiar with Bishop's exquisite, keenly visual poetry will be surprised to learn that the poet was also a painter. Terribly modest about her great talent, Bishop didn't flaunt her passion for painting, which was, after all, a private pursuit, but she did give her watercolors to close friends, and several of her works have graced the covers of her books. Poet William Benton tracked down Bishop's watercolors for a posthumous exhibition (the first ever), and he describes his amusing adventures in a vibrant and affectionate introduction. He writes, "If Bishop wrote like a painter, she painted like a writer," a remark referring, in part, to the diminutiveness of her work, but also to the effortless perspicaciousness of Bishop's renderings. Her luminous and animated pictures of flowers and buildings possess a quirky charm, and there is much more going on than first meets the eye. Happily enough, selections of Bishop's short prose pieces round out this lovely volume. 
Donna Seaman

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Miss Bishop's fifth book of poetry includes such recent works as Crusoe in England, Five Flights Up and the prose poem 12 O'Clock News

Geography III

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell once remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop that "you ha[ve] always been my favorite poet and favorite friend." 
The feeling was mutual. Bishop said that conversation with Lowell left her feeling "picked up again to the proper table-land of poetry," and she once begged him, "Please never stop writing me letters―they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I've been re-reading Emerson) for several days." Neither ever stopped writing letters, from their first meeting in 1947 when both were young, newly launched poets until Lowell's death in 1977. 
Presented in Words in Air is the complete correspondence between Bishop and Lowell. The substantial, revealing―and often very funny―interchange that they produced stands as a remarkable collective achievement, notable for its sustained conversational brilliance of style, its wealth of literary history, its incisive snapshots and portraits of people and places, and its delicious literary gossip, as well as for the window it opens into the unfolding human and artistic drama of two of America's most beloved and influential poets.

LOWELL, ROBERT

Robert Lowell once remarked, "When Elizabeth Bishop's letters are published (as they will be), she will be recognized as not only one of the best, but one of the most prolific writers of our century." One Art is the magificent confirmation of Lowell's prediction. From several thousand letters, written by Bishop over fifty years—from 1928, when she was seventeen, to the day of her death, in Boston in 1979—Robert Giroux, the poet's longtime friend and editor, has selected over five hundred missives for this volume. In a way, the letters comprise Bishop's autobiography, and Giroux has greatly enhanced them with his own detailed, candid, and highly informative introduction. One Art takes us behind Bishop's formal sophistication and reserve, fully displaying the gift for friendship, the striving for perfection, and the passionate, questing, rigorous spirit that made her a great artist.

One Art: Letters of Elizabeth Bishop

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Illustrated portrait of Bishop with cigarette by Darcy Penteado on rear jacket panel.

Questions of Travel

I sort of see you surrounded with fine-tooth combs, sandpaper, nail files, pots of varnish, etc.―with heaps of used commas and semicolons handy, and little useless phrases taken out of their contexts and dying all over the floor," Elizabeth Bishop said upon learning a friend landed a job at The New Yorker in the early 1950s. From 1933 until her death in 1979, Bishop published the vast majority of her poems in the magazine's pages. During those forty years, hundreds of letters passed between Bishop and her editors, Charles Pearce, Katharine White, and Howard Moss. In these letters Bishop discussed the ideas and inspiration for her poems and shared news about her travels, while her editors offered support, commentary, and friendship. Their correspondence provides an unparalleled look into Bishop's writing process, the relationship between a poet and her editors, the internal workings of The New Yorker, and the process of publishing a poem, giving us a rare glimpse into the artistic development of one of the twentieth century's greatest poets.

Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence

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