The Complete Poems: 1927-1979

Elizabeth Bishop was vehement about her art--a perfectionist who didn't want to be seen as a "woman poet." In 1977, two years before her death she wrote, "art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc., into two sexes is to emphasize values in them that are not art." She also deeply distrusted the dominant mode of modern poetry, one practiced with such detached passion by her friend Robert Lowell, the confessional.

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.

• Complete Poems
• Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast
• The Collected Poems: The Corrected Edition (Vintage International)
• The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
• Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
• The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton
• Life Studies and For the Union Dead (FSG Classics)
• Voyage of the Sable Venus: and Other Poems
• A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997
• The Works of Anne Bradstreet (The John Harvard Library)