Poems

A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of the Year

Elizabeth Bishop is one of America's greatest writers, and her art is loved and admired by readers and fellow poets alike. The poems that make up Bishop's small and select body of work display honesty and humor, grief and acceptance, observing nature and human nature with painstaking accuracy. Her poems often start outwardly, with geography and landscape—from New England and Nova Scotia, where she grew up, to Florida and Brazil, where she later lived—and move inexorably toward "the interior," exploring as they do fundamental questions of knowledge and perception, love and solitude, and the ability or inability of form to control chaos.

This new edition includes all the poems that Bishop herself saw into print and a selection of unfinished, posthumously published work. It offers readers the opportunity to experience entire one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry.

"Of all the splendid and curious works belonging to my time, these are the poems that I love best and tire of least." —James Merrill, The Washington Post Book World

"Bishop was not just a good poet but a great one. Bishop accomplished a magical illumination of the ordinary, forcing us to examine our surroundings with the freshness of a friendly alien." ―David Lehman, Newsweek