Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose and Letters » (Reprint)

ROBERT GIROUX, co-editor, was chairman of the editorial board of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Elizabeth Bishop's longtime editor. He edited her Collected Prose (1984) and One Art (1994), her selected letters.

LLOYD SCHWARTZ, co-editor, is Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, classical music editor of The Boston Phoenix, and a regular reviewer for NPR's Fresh Air. In 1994 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. His most recent poetry collection is Cairo Traffic.

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.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Elizabeth Bishop published fewer than 100 poems throughout her life, yet her influence on other poets is wide and deep. John Ashbery dubbed her "a poet's poet's poet." She is -- after Emily Dickinson, perhaps -- our most important American female poet, and it's not absolutely clear she is ours. Bishop was born in Nova Scotia and spent the happiest years of her tumultuous childhood in Canada (she was virtually orphaned by the age of five), before being whisked off to New England "civilization" by her paternal grandparents. She lived an international life, chiefly in Brazil but also Europe, Manhattan, and Key West. The voluminous Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters weighs in at nearly 1,000 pages. Bishop published only four books of poetry, roughly one each decade. Her self-assessment was characteristically modest. "I have written, so far, what I feel is a rather 'precious' kind of poetry, although I am very much opposed to the precious. One wishes things were different, that one could begin all over again."