The Complete Poems: 1927-1979. New York: 1983.Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Print.

 

Contents:

 

This book is very interesting due to its size and the size of the poems within its pages. While some of the earlier poems, such as “The Map” and “Love Lies Sleeping” are smaller in their composition, others like “Songs for a Colored Singer” span several pages. The Complete Poems 1927--1979 is a complete collection of her early and later works:

 

• North & South

• A Cold Spring

• Questions of Travel

• Uncollected Work (1969)

This work was compiled in her previous Complete Poems (1969) and includes:

• Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics

  • "Giant Toad"

  • "Strayed Crab"

  • "Giant Snail"

• "The Hanging of the Mouse"

• "Some Dreams They Forgot"

• "Song"

• "House Guest"

• "Trouvee"

• "Going to the Bakery"

• "Under the Window: Ouro Preto"

The collected work is then rounded out with Bishop’s final publication:

• Geography III

 

None of these poems differ from her earlier work as far as her attention to detail, but anyone reading this collection should note the personal tones, especially in her later uncollected work from 1969, the “Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics” surrounding crabs and toads, and snails. She takes on the voice of the animal by a means of escape from herself. These three poems within this sub-category, up until “Some Dreams They Forgot” are prose poetry, providing a nice break in the verse-flow of the works both previous and following.

 

Previous Publication:

 

Most of the poems in this collection were previously published in The New Yorker. Others were published in Direction, Harper’s Bazaar, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, New Directions, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Quarterly Review of Literature, Saturday Review, Shenandoah, and Vassar Review.

 

Critical Reaction:

 

Clapp, Susannah. “Sweet Home.” The London Review of Books. London: 1983. Vol. 5, No. 9.

“This new book adds some fifty unpublished or uncollected poems, including the whole of Geography III (1976) and a scatter of later verse. Among the previously unpublished poems there is little that changes the nature of her claim to importance as a maker of luminous landscapes.”

 

Bromwich, David. “Morality and Invention in a Single Thought.” 1983. The New York Times.

“It seems almost an impertinence to add that of the poets of her generation, with temperaments often more conspicuously adaptable than hers, Elizabeth Bishop alone now seems secure beyond the disputation of schools or the sway of period loyalties. Like all great poets, she was less a maker of poems than a maker of feelings.”