Collected Prose: Elizabeth Bishop - Hardcover

Bishop, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374126283 ISBN 13: 9780374126285

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984

Synopsis

The quality of Elizabeth Bishop's prose is as distinctive and personal as that of her poems. This rich collection, compiled by her editor, Robert Giroux, is arranged in two parts, fiction and nonfiction.

About this title

Review:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux first published Elizabeth Bishop's Collected Prose in 1984, five years after the poet's death. It's now too late to ask whether this deeply private woman would have allowed such an act, let alone approved of the biographies and studies that have begun to appear. It's not too late, however, to praise her editor's decision to gather her fiction and nonfiction together. Without it we would not have the dreamlike "The Sea & Its Shore" (in which a man hired to rid the beach of trash tries to make sense of each scrap of writing he comes upon) or memoirs such as "Primer Class," which begins, "Every time I see long columns of numbers, handwritten in a certain way, a strange sensation or shudder, partly aesthetic, partly painful goes through my diaphragm." Precise as ever, Bishop continues, "It is like seeing the dorsal fin of a large fish suddenly cut through the surface of the water." The collection's two standouts are "Efforts of Affection," a memoir of her mentor Marianne Moore, and the comic masterwork "The U.S.A. School of Writing." The latter is a sly recollection of her first job--at a deeply dodgy correspondence school. "Henry James once said that he who would aspire to be a writer must inscribe on his banner the one word 'Loneliness.' In the case of my students, their need was not to ward off society, but to get into it."

About the Author:

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79) remains one of America's most celebrated and admired postwar poets. She won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her verse, and served as Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress in 1949-50.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1984
• ISBN 10: 0374126283
• ISBN 13: 9780374126285
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Giroux Robert