Random House: Book Details for The Complete Poems
books at random  
          Search by author, title or isbn
 
   
   
          Advanced search   Advanced search
home author events how to buy news by email bookmark
                   
  The Complete Poems
by Elizabeth Bishop
 
Open the book to browse, search and read an extract
 
 

Click to enlarge
RRP £12.99
Trade Paperback

   

Print-friendly page

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.

 

More Information
Chatto & Windus • Poetry & poets • Previous ISBN: 0701178027
Publication date: 16/09/2004 • 304 pages • Demy Octavo • EAN: 9780701178024

 
 
 
Buy The Complete Poems and other great titles from rBooks.co.uk.