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 negland 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.