Poems

Poems

A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011This is the definitive edition of the work of one of America's greatest poets, increasingly recognized as one of the greatest English-language poets of the twentieth century, loved by readers and poets alike. Bishop's poems combine humor 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. This new edition offers readers the opportunity to take in, entire, one of the great careers in twentiethcentury poetry.From Publishers WeeklyTo celebrate the centennial of the birth of Bishop (1911-1979), FSG is releasing three landmark volumes of her writing in one month-new editions of her poems and prose, plus her complete correspondence with her editors at the New Yorker. Poems includes the complete text of what is for many a lifelong bedside companion, the 1983 Complete Poems, plus selections from the drafts and poems in progress from Bishop's archive, first published as Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox. Especially in the years since her death, Bishop has become one of America's most beloved poets, known for her careful and deceptively layered descriptions ("I looked into his eyes/ which were far larger than mine/ but shallower, and yellowed,/ the irises backed and packed/ with tarnished tinfoil," she famously says of a just-caught fish), and this new edition is the most loving treatment of her poetic output, the best place to start and perhaps all one needs in the end. (This title is also available with Prose as a hardcover boxed set, , ISBN 978-0-374-12558-5.) (Feb.)(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.Review?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, NewsweekAbout the AuthorThe modern American poetElizabeth Bishop (1911-79) received the Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for her collectionPoems: North & South. A Cold Spring, the National Book Award forThe Complete Poems (1969), the National Book Critics' Circle Award in 1976, and many other distinctions and accolades for her work. She was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. She traveled widely as an adult, living for years in France and then Brazil, before returning to the United States.