Bishop, Elizabeth. Poems: North and South/ A Cold Spring. Boston: 1955. Houghton Mifflin Company. The Riverside Press Cambridge. Print.

Contents:

Poems: North & South/ A Cold Spring combines Bishop’s first complete published work with the newer poems from her more recent travels. The poems from North & South are still in their original order, with the newer poems tacked on almost as an afterthought:

“A Cold Spring”
“Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance”
“The Bight”
“A Summer’s Dream”
“Cape Breton”
“At The Fishhouses”
“View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress”
“Insomnia”
“The Prodigal”
“Faustina, or Rock Roses”
“Varick Street”
“Four Poems”
“Argument”
“Letter to N.Y.”
“The Mountain”
“Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore”
“Arrival at Santos”
“The Shampoo” - one of the more personal poems published during Bishop’s lifetime

Bishop’s work takes experiences and instances from her everyday life and turns them into something we would never think about. Her attention to detail, as in her “View of The Capitol from the Library of Congress,” gives us a new outlook. Bishop, who was appointed Poetry Consultant in 1946 thanks to Robert Lowell, prefers to glance out of the window and try to catch the songs played by the Air Force Band.

The new collection ends similarly to North & South: hopeful and sincere. Bishop’s speaker in her final A Cold Spring poem, “The Shampoo,” is wringing a shooting stars from her friend’s dark hair into a basin. While she does not say what she will do with them once collected into “this big tin basin/ battered and shiny like the moon,” shooting stars are meant to carry wishes.

Previous Publications:

In the Acknowledgement section of this book, Bishop notes where each poem was originally published before being compiled.

In The New Yorker:

“At the Fishhouses”
“A Summer’s Dream”
“The Bight”
“Cape Breton”
“The Prodigal”
“Insomnia”
“View from the Library of Congress”
“A Cold Spring”
“Arrival At Santos”
“Cirque d’Hiver”
“Little Exercise”
“Chemin de Fer”
“Large Bad Picture”

Other poems appeared in Direction, The Forum, Harper’s Bazaar, Life & Letters To-Day, The Nation, New Democracy, The New Republic, Partisan Review, Poetry, A Magazine of Verse, The Quarterly Review, and Trial Balances.

Critical Reaction:

John Ashbury/ Quoted from Travisano, Thomas. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. 1989. University of Virginia Press. Print.

“As one who read, reread, studied, and absorbed Miss Bishop’s first book and waited impatiently for her second one, I felt slightly disappointed when it did finally arrive nine years later…. Some of the new poems were not, for me, up to the perhaps impossibly high standard set by the first book. Several seemed content with picture making…. And in several, the poet’s life threatened to intrude on the poetry in a way that did not suit it.”

Travisano, Thomas. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. 1989. University of Virginia Press. Print.

“A Cold Spring does contain a handful of comparatively slight poems, such as “View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress,” “Letter to NY,” and “The Shampoo,” and Ahsbury is rightly cautious about a half-dozen less-than-fully-achieved love poems, in which “the poet’s life” uncomfortably “threatens to intrude.” But in the book’s five or six finest poems, at least, Bishop attacks with wit, grace, and cogent insight some of the unsettling questions posed by her erlier work.”

“[Elizabeth Bishop is] one of the best poets alive!”

-Donald Hall, 1955, in review of Poems: North and South--A Cold Spring

Prizes and Awards:

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1956

Poems: North & South/ A Cold Spring (1955)

Bishop, Elizabeth. Poems: North and South/ A Cold Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955. The Riverside Press Cambridge. Print.