Complete Poems
Elizabeth Bishop · 1969
Bishop published only 101 poems in her lifetime and every one is perfect. Her precision (the accuracy of a fish's "iridescent" skin, the exact way a waterspout looks moving across the ocean) is matched by an emotional restraint that makes her grief, when it arrives in "One Art," hit like a hammer. Robert Lowell called her the best poet of their generation. The art of losing.
The case against
Reticence has costs. Bishop describes a fish, a moose, a filling station with matchless accuracy and then, often, declines to risk anything further; entire poems are exquisite travelogue. The output is tiny and the temperature low, and if you need poetry to bleed a little, her famous control can read as refusal.
Poetry · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
