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Loading... Elizabeth Bishop the Complete Poems (original 1969; edition 1970)by Elizabeth Bishop
Work InformationThe Complete Poems by Elizabeth Bishop (1969)
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)811.5Literature English (North America) American poetry 20th CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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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.
The New York Times Book Review, David Bromwich
Like all great poets, she was less a maker of poems than a maker of feelings. ( )