Bishop, Elizabeth, Robert Giroux, and Lloyd Schawrtz. Poems, Prose, and Letters. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008. Print.

 

Content:
 

Poems, Prose, and Letters  brings Bishop’s previously published works together with letters and previously unpublished prose, poetry, and drafts to give a full image of Bishop’s work both during her life and after her death

 

Until the year she died, Elizabeth Bishop wrote constantly. Letters, poems, short stories, each of them given a different portion of her emotion and attention to detail. Some remarked on her time in Nova Scotia, some to Florida, and some to Brazil. Although she traveled a great deal, she never failed to respond to letters and notify her friends of particularly fascinating instances in her life.

 

Poems, Prose, and Letters compiles several of her short stories, poems both familiar and uncollected, and letters, including:

 

• North & South

• A Cold Spring

• Questions of Travel

• from The Complete Poems

  • Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics

  • "The Hanging of the Mouse"

  • "Some Dreams They Forgot"

  • "Song"

  • "House Guest"

  • "Trouvee"

  • "Going to the Bakery"

  • "Under the Window: Ouro Preto"

• Geography III

• Late Poems

  • "Santarem"

  • "North Haven" -written in memory of Robert Lowell in 1978

  • "Pink Dog"

  • "Sonnet"

• Uncollected Poems

  • "The Ballad of the Subway Train"

  • "Behind a Stowe"

  • "To a Tree"

  • "Thunder"

  • "Sonnet"

  • "Imber Nocturnus"

  • "For C.W.B."

  • "The Wave"

  • "Dead"

  • "A Word with You"

  • "The Flood"

  • "Hymn to the Virgin"

  • "Three Sonnets for the Eyes"

  • "Three Valentines"

  • "The Reprimand"

  • "The Wit"

  • "Exchanging Hats"

  • "A Norther--Key West"

  • "Thank-You Note"

• Unpublished Poems and Drafts

• Translations

• Personal Essays, Reminiscences, and Reporting

  • Roof-Tops,

  • On Being Alone

  • A Mouse and Mice

  • Gregorio Valdes, 1879–1939

  • Mercedes Hospital

  • Introduction to The Diary of "Helena Morley"

  • A New Capital, Aldous Huxley, and Some Indians

  • Primer Class

  • The Country Mouse

  • A Warm and Reasonable People

  • On the Railroad Named Delight

  • The U.S.A. School of Writing

  • A Trip to Vigia

  • Wesley Wehr

  • Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore

  • To the Botequim & Back

• Stories

• Literary Statements and Reviews

• Letters - Only 53 included, written between 1933 and 1979. Recipients include Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Randall Jarrell, Anne Stevenson, May Swenson, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade.

 

Critical Reaction:

 

“No further proof is necessary to show that Bishop—still not widely known beyond literary circles at the time of her death in 1979—has, posthumously in the last three decades, become one of America's most popular 20th-century poets, but this hefty and handsome volume from the Library of America certainly clinches the deal. Between its covers one can find most of the perfectionist author's oeuvre, more than enough to confirm Bishop as a master at revealing the complexity of simple, often painful things (I said to myself: three days/ and you'll be seven years old./ I was saying it to stop/ the sensation of falling off the round, turning world/ into cold, blue-black space./ But I felt: you are an I, you are an Elizabeth). All the poems gathered in the now-classic Collected Poems are here, as are the unpublished drafts released in 2006's controversial Edgar Allen Poe and the Jukebox. The memoir and fiction pieces of Collected Prose are also reprinted, along with a few other pieces of scattered nonfiction, as well as a generous selection of Bishop's enthralling letters. Bishop's work is deeply compassionate and necessary reading, and now almost all of it can be found in one place.”

Publisher’s Weekly. February. http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-59853-017-9