Amazon.co.uk Review
Elizabeth Bishop was vehement about her art--a perfectionist who didn't want to be seen as a "woman poet". In 1977, two years before her death she wrote, "art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc., into two sexes is to emphasize values in them that are not art." She also deeply distrusted the dominant mode of modern poetry, one practiced with such detached passion by her friend Robert Lowell, the confessional.
Bishop was unforgiving of fashion and limited ways of seeing and feeling, but cast an even more trenchant eye on her own work. One wishes this volume were thicker, though the perfections within mark the rightness of her approach. The poems are sublimely controlled, fraught with word play, fierce moral vision (see her caustic ballad on Ezra Pound, "Visits to St Elizabeths") and reticence. From the surreal sorrow of the early "Man-Moth" (leaping off from a typo she had come across for "mammoth"), about a lonely monster who rarely emerges from "the pale subways of cement he calls his home", to the beauty of her villanelle "One Art" (with its repeated "the art of losing isn't hard to master"), the poet wittily explores distance and desolation, separation and sorrow.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
This edition of the work of Elizabeth Bishop includes her four published volumes, 50 previously uncollected pieces and translations of Octavia Paz, Max Jacob and others. The author's many awards include the Pulitzer Prize (1956).
by John Ashbery
by Wallace Stevens
by John Ashbery
by Robert Lowell
by Anne Stevenson
