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Product Description
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 is the definitive edition of one of America's greatest poets, increasingly recognised as one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century, loved by readers and poets alike. This collection includes her four published volumes, fifty uncollected works, and translation of Octavio Paz, Max Jacob and others. Bishop's poems combine humour 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. Her father died when she was one, her mother was committed to a mental hospital when Elizabeth was five, and her life was often psychologically or physically difficult. She was witty and shunned self-pity, but some poems thinly conceal her estrangements as a woman, a lesbian, an orphan, a geographically rootless traveler, a frequently hospitalized asthmatic, and a sufferer of depression and alcoholism. "I'm not interested in big-scale work as such," she once told Lowell. "Something needn't be large to be good." 'When we read her, we enter the classical serenity of a new country,' Robert Lowell. If ever there was a poet whose every scrap of writing should be in print, that poet must be Elizabeth Bishop' Christopher Reid.
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94% buy the item featured on this page: Complete Poems £9.09 |
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