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.

Product Description
Highly regarded throughout her prestigious literary career, and today seen as an undeniable master of her art, Elizabeth Bishop remains one of America's most influential and widely acclaimed poets. This is the definitive collection of her work. The Complete Poems includes the books North & South, A Cold Spring, Questions of Travel, and Geography III, as well as previously uncollected poems, translations, and juvenilia.

This book is a treasure trove. It rewards multiple readings. Bishop's craftsmanship has ensured that this book will continue to endure even as bigger names of her era fall by the wayside.


A Harvest of Joy   September 11, 2002
 29 out of 31 found this review helpful

Gosh, it is hard to sum up one's feelings about the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. She is one of those artists, like Shakespeare and Mozart and Cervantes, whose work contains such perfection it seems almost sacrilegious to comment upon it.

And she was ALWAYS a good poet. This volume proves it by publishing much of her juvenilia alongside more mature, better known poems as the wonderful "Florida", "Sestina", and the majestic "The Fish", a poem I enjoy teaching to my students every semester as a supreme example of imagery (I defy them to find instances of abstract language in the poem; there aren't many). Also included is an astonishing series of translations Bishop rendered over the years, mostly of South American poets, including Octavio Paz.

All in all, this is a treasure trove, a book for the ages, and a reminder of what we lost with Bishop's early death at age 68.


a lot of great poems   May 13, 2000
 19 out of 22 found this review helpful

Probably like a lot of people, I was led to Elizabeth Bishop by the dedication in Robert Lowell's great "Skunk Hour". I like many of the poems in this book. (I know next to nothing about poetry but, to give you an idea, my favorite poet is Yeats.) Bishop has a lot of thoughtful imagery, and she conceptualizes things in a fresh way. It often takes you aback. To take the very first poem here, "The Map," there're the lines: "The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still. / Labrador's yellow, where the moony Eskimo / has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays, / under a glass as if they were expected to blossom"

The book is in roughly chronological format, and naturally the poems on the whole seem to get better, subtler, through the years (a few things later are a little strange). Armadillo, referred to by Lowell, reads a bit like a companion piece of Skunk Hour: "This is the time of year / when almost every night / the frail, illegal fire balloons appear. / Climbing the mountain height, / Rising toward a saint / still honored in these parts, . . ." I confess my favorite poem here would be "Crusoe in England", a revery: "I felt a deep affection for / the smallest of my island industries. / No, not exactly, since the smallest was / a miserable philosophy. / Because I didn't know enough. / Why didn't I know enough of something? / Greek drama or astronomy? The books / I'd read were full of blanks", and then, back in England, "The knife there on the shelf--/ it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix. / It lived. How many years did I / beg it, implore it, not to break? . . . / Now it won't look at me at all."

One thing I'd mention is, there isn't much in the way of unifying currents through the poems. Yeats, I think, has his Irish legends and politics and a pretty characteristic moral tone. Frost, his woods. Sylvia Plath, her hell. Bishop however comes across as an incidental observer of things. Her poems (even with each of the original collections, except maybe one) vary widely in theme, place, audience, mood. Here's a homage to Robert Lowell, and next an oddly rhyming poem on Rio de Janeiro. One page it's "View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress," next it's "Insomnia" (one of poems here that I guess could be seen as having a sapphic aspect to it). It's as if Bishop were always visiting different places and people and taking in what she came across (in fact, she was often in foreign lands; the cover has a drawing by her in Mexico). I don't necessarily like this aspect of her poetry as a whole--it reminds me of why I'm not a big fan of Katherine Mansfield. But of course that's saying nothing about each poem.

A poem by Manuel Bandeira which Bishop translated (included here) goes: "I would like my last poem thus . . . that it have the beauty of almost scentless flowers . . ." That's what a lot of these poems are like. These are said to be all of Bishop's known poems--she died in 1979--including stuff she wrote at 16 which, as this edition helpfully notes, "appeared in the Walnut Hill School magazine in 1927". It's a handsomely-done edition, with pleasant font and roomy margins. 275 pages.


one of the best in american poetry   December 14, 2003
 16 out of 18 found this review helpful

Elizabeth Bishop is one of the greatest American poets we've ever had--only Frost and perhaps maybe Whitman are more important. She is certainly Emily Dickinson's equal, and in my opinion, a finer poet. When discussing American poetry, Bishop can't be ignored. Her imagery, her use of form, her command over the language is rarely matched, and this collection contains all her work. There's her first book, _North & South_, which is one of the finest volumes of poetry produced. You'll find poems like "The Map," "The Man-Moth," "The Weed," "The Imaginary Iceberg," "Seascape," and the masterful poem, "The Fish." _A Cold Spring_ follows, containing "At the Fishhouse" and "Letter to N.Y." "The Armadillo" (Bishop's poem to Robert Lowell), "Filling Station," "Visits to St. Elizabeths" and "Sestina" (one of the few poems in this form that actually works) follows in _Questions of Travel_. Then there is a selection of uncollected work (1969) before we hit _Geography III_ which contains two of her best poems, "Cruso in England" and "One Art"--which is in my opinion her best poem. The collection rounds out with some more uncollected poems, juvenalia, and some fine translations. Overall, you have an important book by one of our most important poets.


Beautiful words by a master poet   August 26, 2005
 10 out of 11 found this review helpful

Poetry's allure is its ability to capture the essence of a moment: a picture in time, an emotion, a look. More than any other American poet, Elizabeth Bishop was able to do this, as her _Complete Poems_ illustrates. Regardless of poetic form she consistently is able to distill and share her unique vision of the world. It is a pity that there is not more of her work; the poetry she left us is beautiful and brilliant.