The Complete Poems

by Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop was vehement about her art--a perfectionist who didn't want to be seen as a "woman poet." In 1977, two years before her death she wrote, "art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc., into two sexes is to emphasize values in them that are not art." She also deeply distrusted the dominant mode of modern poetry, one practiced with such detached passion by her friend Robert Lowell, the confessional. Bishop was unforgiving of fashion and limited ways of seeing and feeling, but cast an even more trenchant eye on her own work. One wishes this volume were thicker, though the perfections within mark the rightness of her approach. The poems are sublimely controlled, fraught with word play, fierce moral vision (see her caustic ballad on Ezra Pound, "Visits to St. Elizabeths"), and reticence. From the surreal sorrow of the early "Man-Moth" (leaping off from a typo she had come across for "mammoth"), about a lonely monster who rarely emerges from "the pale subways of cement he calls his home," to the beauty of her villanelle "One Art" (with its repeated "the art of losing isn't hard to master"), the poet wittily explores distance and desolation, separation and sorrow.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, American, Literature, Fiction, 20th Century, Queer

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and writer from Worcester, Massachusetts. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956. and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. She is considered one of the most important and distinguished American poets of the 20th century.

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot be objective: Bishop was a friend since HS, throughout the Vassar College years and beyond, of my mentor and patron Rhoda Sheehan; in fact, Bishop rented Rhoda's "Hurricane House" that floated over Westport Harbor in the '38 hurricane. That's where I met her once, individually, and asked her about prosody. I never realized until I read a Bishop biography, maybe Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, how much effort Rhoda must have put into getting Bishop to talk to me. She dreaded students, even when she was fairly remunerated out at U WA when she took over a year or two for Roethke.

Fairly remunerated she was not by my humble Bristol Community College, where she gave readings three years in a row in the late 70s, when she'd come back from Brazil--and when her longtime Brazilian friend committed suicide. One of those "readings" she played and discussed sambas--how everyone in Brazil wrote them, the janitor, the poet laureate. She played a few on an old 78 phonograph, to an audience of perhaps 25, while our community college students on break from class were in the next "room" (divided by a supposed wall, movable) playing rock on 6' speakers by their pool table. I recall thinking at the time: One major trouble with modern life is that the wrong people (and interests) have the best megaphones and speakers.

Since Rhoda was her friend, Bishop came to talk for a Department outlay of $100, too low for administrators to care about the event. A decade earlier we had had Ginsberg and even WH Auden (then priced at $3500) to read. By the late 80s, no adminstrator knew the distinguished history of our poetry readings, and when they came up with $1500 inflated dollars to invite a Pawtucket poet (with some name, yes), they bragged about "our first prominent poetry reading." We had also, in the 80s, had Marge Piercy from the Cape, and I would invite several including Alan Dugan.

I think Bishop is the Dickinson of my lifetime: low, under the radar of fame and celebration until quite late in her life, though always known to the best editors and people like Roethke. Bishop tinkered with her great vilanelle "One Art" for years at Rhoda Sheehan's Hurricane House--perhaps the central achievement of Westport in verse, though we have housed in summers distinguished profs and critics galore, including from the New Yorker and the NYT.
Bishop's colloquialism is deceptive, appearing casual but in fact finely honed. Still, I do not find her poems easy to remember and recite, except "One Art." "The art of losing isn't hard to master..."
But as with any great poet, there are lines throughout that pop out when re-read. Last night we had tremendous thunder storms in the wake of the devastating tornadoes a couple weeks ago in Oklahoma.
Bishop has it, "Personal and spiteful as a neighbor's child,/ thunder began to bang and bump the roof" (Eectrical Storm).
Well, I did not know enough to learn much from her when I met her, though I learned lots every time she read at my college, but I can boast this: I cleaned a fish--a Bluefish-- for the author of The Fish, for her and her friends including Alice Methfessel from California.

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 5 out of 5]

If we search to the bottom of ourselves, we see we're all pariahs before God.

"Left-handed, lost," said W.H. Auden of himself, having climbed up to full awakening: "it was eyes we looked at, not the view..."

And as Dante reaches the samadhi of Seventh Heaven merely by gazing at Beatrice's eyes, and not at what she looks at...

So Saint-Exupery as well - he sees the World by studying its Meaning.
***

Samadhi, likewise, can be a disaster!

Now we see the World for what it is, along with the Little Prince.

One ancient Zen adept, on seeing into the Eye of the Dharma, suddenly saw his view was upside down to the world:

So, to prove to his Master he had attained kensho, he walked about the zendo balancing one sandal on his head...

But as the witches say to Macbeth, fair is foul and foul is fair; for temporary insanity is only the dirty trick played on the innocent by the Fallen World.
***

Elizabeth Bishop, seeing through herself - through the shocked eyes of her own true love for her female partner - became through the deceitfully simple medium of her poison pen (the Real author of these poems) just that: A pariah.

She was in fact one of the first Rainbow Warriors - and, if that's not enough, she proved herself as that during America's phobically paranoid post-war Cold War.

And you thought James Baldwin had it bad.

Scratch the surface of any sensitive, "labelled" individual, you'll see the same. The ungainly, common and narrow world asserts its dominance by disenfranchising dissent.

But every gentrified label self-condemns the complacent moral majority before its Maker's judgement seat.
***

Up close and personal, through the eyes of any persecuted pariah, this book is a delightful holy terror when you grasp its moral sense.

If you're Christian you see the terror lies in the death wish of evil upon goodness. This book is NOT written by an "obscene" castoff.

Elizabeth Bishop was no St. Simon Stylites, but then she didn't have to be -

She was just being herself!

For her Poetry was saintly martyrdom enough.

[Ulysse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sestina for Elizabeth Bishop

Here I am trying to write a sestina
In honour of Elizabeth Bishop
But as I look out of my window
All I see is a long city street
Six garbage cans and one skinny flower
Each dealing in its own way with the rain

Have you ever tried describing the rain?
It’s much harder than writing a sestina
Much harder than tending a flower
Or capturing the Queen with your Bishop
For to pin down the rain in the street
You must be ready to crawl out your window

What would Elizabeth see from my window?
So much more I bet than the rain
Sweeping along my old street
Twisting and turning like a sestina
Seeping into all things including that bishop
Whose crozier resembles a flower

Yes a thing as mundane as a flower
Seen from her apartment window
Would take on the hilarity of a bishop
Running for cover in the rain
And she’d mention somewhere in her sestina
What six garbage cans signify in the street

Every poet’s mind is a street
Which leads to the heart of a flower
And whether one does odes or sestinas
This flower's a many-sided window
Through which one can gaze at the rain
With the faith of an eccentric-eyed bishop

Yet I am not Elizabeth Bishop
Peering down at the bountiful street
Hearing the many voices of the rain
Whilst a common unassuming flower
Sits coolly on the ledge of my window
And composes a timeless sestina

If you would like a bishop to speak in sestinas
Just give him a window overlooking a street
—His marble brain will flower in the rain

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 5 out of 5]

The carefully-wrought imagery of an American Master, brimming with controlled emotion:

IMAGINARY ICEBERGS

We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship,
although it meant the end of travel.
Although it stood stock-still like cloudy rock
and all the sea were moving marble.
***
Icebergs behoove the soul
(both being self-made from elements least visible)
to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible.

[Roxanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this collection. I did enjoy One Art:

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

[Jenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very few Bishop poems touch overtly on the subject of romantic love. The following poem does, and it tugs on one's heartstrings as deftly as any Lucinda Williams country song:


"Insomnia"

The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.

By the Universe deserted,
SHE'd tell it to go to hell,
and she'd find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well

into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

***

At the other end of the spectrum, Bishop's poem "Pink Dog" stands out as a stomach-turningly potent piece of social commentary. It appears that this woman excelled at virtually every form and genre of poetry.

[Andrew]

Elizabeth Bishop is about the closest thing I know of to a "pure" poet in 20th Century America, untrammeled by attempts at linguistic experimentation, song-like prosody, or confessional rambling. Simply a perspective encapsulated in the purest, truest language imaginable. And she deserves all of her plaudits. Sure there are other poets whom I connect to more, but Bishop seems to me the queen of the form. I'm terribly glad I finally took in all her work at once.

[Hendrik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elizabeth Bishop war mir absolut kein Begriff, bis ich diesen Band geschenkt bekam, der eine breite Auswahl an Gedichten aus ihrem Werk enthält. Obwohl es immer schwierig ist Lyrik adäquat in eine andere Sprache zu übertragen, ist das Steffen Popp nach meinem Empfinden gut gelungen. Seine Versionen bleiben zwar nah am Original, bewahren aber stets eine gewisse Eigenständigkeit. Neben dem Inhalt verdient auch die formschöne Gestaltung ein Lob. Ein Buch, das ich im Laufe der letzten Monate, immer wieder gerne zur Hand genommen habe.

Eine kleine Kostprobe:

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

(…)

Verlieren, diese Kunst zu lernen ist nicht schwer;
so viele Dinge, scheints, sind geradezu bereit
für das Verlorengehen, sie fehlen dir nicht sehr.

Verlier was jeden Tag. Das Durcheinander
verlorener Türschlüssel nimm hin, die vertane Zeit.
Verlieren, diese Kunst zu lernen ist nicht schwer.

Dann üb Verlieren weiter, und verliere schneller:
Orte, und Namen, und wohin deine Reise
gehen sollte. Nichts davon schmerzt dich sehr.

(…)

One Art / Eine Kunst

[Kiran Bhat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm just now trying to get into Bishop's poetry after years of attempting but not getting entranced. Now that I've gotten it I've really gotten it. When Bishop's words have intruded they have started to stream into your blood, and rush it straight to your head. Bishop's poetry tends to be prose-like but that doesn't mean that Bishop endeavoured to write in prose. When Bishop describes an event or situation or space she does it with the utmost attention. She has a unique ability to transform a situation that is seemingly banal and make it seem like the most urgent thing to have happened to someone ever. And that is an utmost gift.

I recommend for anyone who is learning how to write to read Bishop. She teaches you how to really pay attention to your words - not because she is trying so hard to craft them, but because she endowed so much care into anything she observed.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

That very thought has occurred to me on occasion. This collection was a slow start. The images were dense, looped and anchored in rocky soil. There was a trace of fear upon entry: a hesitation. Perhaps there was a benefit; I know nothing about Bishop’s biography, though I’m guessing there were extensive travels to Brazil. It was Teju Cole who pointed the way. He has proved a reliable curator.

[♛Tash]

into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.
- Insomnia

From my favorite poem

[Melody Schwarting · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not quite sure how Bishop got on my radar. I didn't hate reading these poems, but I didn't find much to love, either. I always like sharing my favorite poems in a review, but nothing stands out enough for me to share.

[David M · Rating 5 out of 5]

The brown enormous odor he lived by
was too close, with its breathing and thick hair,
for him to judge. The floor was rotten; the sty
was plastered halfway up with glass-smooth dung.
Light-lashed, self-righteous, above moving snouts,
the pigs' eyes followed him, a cheerful stare--
even to the sow that always ate her young--
till, sickening, he leaned to scratch her head.
But sometimes mornings after drinking bouts
(he hid the pints behind the two-by-fours),
the sunrise glazed the barnyard mud with red
the burning puddles seemed to reassure.
And then he thought he almost might endure
his exile yet another year or more.

But evenings the first star came to warn.
The farmer whom he worked for came at dark
to shut the cows and horses in the barn
beneath their overhanging clouds of hay,
with pitchforks, faint forked lightnings, catching light,
safe and companionable as in the Ark.
The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored.
The lantern--like the sun, going away--
laid on the mud a pacing aureole.
Carrying a bucket along a slimy board,
he felt the bats' uncertain staggering flight,
his shuddering insights, beyond his control,
touching him. But it took him a long time
finally to make up his mind to go home.

[Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the May 14, 2009 issue of The London Review of Books, Colm Tóibín writes that in the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, "Description was a desperate way of avoiding self-description; looking at the world was a way of looking out from the self." He goes on to say that "The fact that the world was there was both enough and far too little for Bishop. Its history or her own history were beside the point." Given that the lyric mode† has become the dominant mode of contemporary poetry (as opposed to epic or didactic or pastoral modes), and given that contemporary lyric is often conceived as "overheard" or confessional poetry, Tóibín's contention is an interesting one. When we overhear Bishop, we don't hear her talking about herself. She's talking about fish or armadillos or moose. For a reader steeped in the patent egoism (and occasional egotism) of contemporary lyric poets like Louise Glück, Frederick Seidel, John Ashberry, or Jorrie Graham, Elizabeth Bishop cuts an odd figure. There seems to be not very much Elizabeth Bishop in the poems of Elizabeth Bishop. Biographical critics, meet your ultimate foe.

Yet reading this collection, which includes all published poems, unpublished poems from her youth, and a series of translations, one sees that Tóibín is not altogether right. Bishop's description was not a desperate way of "avoiding self-description"; it was in fact her very method of self-description. In fish and armadillos and moose she saw human characteristics that dissolved the boundaries we are wont to erect between human and animal. Observe how in "The Fish," Bishop struggles to reject the animal as something fully other:

I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip--
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.

...

Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.

The narrator toggles between anthropomorphizing description ("his sullen face") and clinical, distant language ("the mechanism of his jaw"), correcting herself mid-stride ("if you could call it a lip," "or four and a wire leader"). This is a wonderful poem that transmutes the fish-out-of-water disorientation to the person who has caught the fish. She cannot make sense of it, categorize it, and when she tries, she wrestles with signs of noble struggle, even wisdom, and confirmations that it is a beast with eyes "shallower" and "yellowed" when compared with human eyes, eyes that don't "return my stare." It's wise and mundane, deep and shallow, all at once. In the final lines, the mystery of the fish overwhelms the narrator's sense of victory:

I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

Surrendering the fish means surrendering her attempt to figure it out. Much of what I find stirring and delightful about Bishop's poetry is this surrendering posture, an angle of defeat that never fully lets on quite what it's up to. In more overt poems like "Questions of Travel," Bishop unabashedly poses a series of difficult questions that imply defeat, including the famous closing lines:

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there ... No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?

It is in the struggle for understanding that Bishop finds the vitality of the self. This reminds me of Louise Glück's poetry, but Bishop's feels less like therapeutic self-expression, and it is the better for it. For Bishop locates the turmoil between what she thinks she knows and what she cannot or does not know not only in her own head but also in heads of seemingly the weakest or most ridiculous creatures. In doing so, she suggests an identification between herself and vulnerable animals like the armadillo or the sandpiper. This identification has a way of both expanding the range of her conundrums--they afflict even weak animals--and reducing their self-importance--if even a sandpiper can have the view that "The world is mist. And then the world is / minute and vast and clear," how special is it that we can, too?

"Sandpiper" closes

he is preoccupied,

looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray,
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

This is Bishop, too. We find her looking for something, something, something, darting her head among the objects and mysteries of material life like a sandpiper flitting its head along the pebbled shore. Her collected poems prove that among the million grains she knows where the rose and amethyst lie.


†On the rise of the lyric mode in modern and contemporary poetry, see Michael Silk's important chapter "Lyric and Lyrics: Perspectives Ancient and Modern" in the Cambridge Companion to Greek Lyric, pp. 373ff. Silk ably demonstrates how privileging one mode of poetry, the lyric mode, reached such an extent that the mode itself is now synonymous with poetry.

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Better with every reading.

[Sasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elizabeth, I liked some of your poems, found some of them beautiful, or touching or delicately structured. Not especially profound, but you don't strike me as having invested much in the profound, rather the fleeting, the unintended and the suddenly honest. You also did not speak often of love, except perhaps in your manuscript poems, which you hid and which did not escape until after your death. So much for the love poems. They were some or your best, by the way-- if only you had been bolder about the sexy bits. So thank you for sharing your poetry, because I read it all-- within the space of 24 hours or so and I have learned (as least) one important thing: good poems are hard to come by, even from oneself. Perhaps especially so.

[Juliana · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5 stars. I wrote about this book here: Questions of displacement - http://wp.me/p79SOn-BT #readwomen

[Gregory Duke]

I can't rate a collection that compiles collections. That seems more arbitrary than the already arbitrary notion of numerical ratings in general.

North & South: 4/5

A Cold Spring: 2/5

Questions of Travel: 4/5

Geography III: 4.5/5 or maybe a 5/5

I don't know. Poetry is so hard to quantify.

I love Bishop's distance. At times, it becomes too much, and I struggle to gather meaning from the crumbs she throws my way, but, other times, she really delves deep into locale, object, memory and excavates some genuine cognition within her turn of phrase. Her rhymes are remarkably witty without ever attaining the standard status of rhyme as sing-song, rhyme as lilt, instead allowing her rhymes to breathe sonorously through their genuine nature. Her topics are broad, and I can't say I was ever truly bored except for a few scant flops and for most of A Cold Spring. One Art and In the Waiting Room deserve the hype.

[soulAdmitted · Rating 2 out of 5]

Io ho delle serie resistenze riguardo al periodo ittico di Elizabeth Bishop.
Non so: “aria che sa di merluzzo” e raschiare scaglie e triglie, tovaglie e stoviglie (da pesce, presumibilmente).
Anche riguardo alla sua fase ornitologica sono ritrosissima. Un po’ come mi capita con il periodo botanico di Marianne Moore, per dire.
Niente. Rivoglio i pesci e i fiori di Sexton, Plath, Rich, Hacker. Con tutte le spine.

[Ffiamma · Rating 4 out of 5]

"i lost two cities, lovely ones. and, vaster,
some realms i owned, two rivers, a continent.
i miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
- even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
i love) i shan't have lied. it's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (write it!) like disaster"

[Sherry Chandler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bishop forces me to slow down and savor -- I don't always want to do that but when I do the rewards are great.

[grace]

JPO STEP ONE: DONE ✅✅

to the one and only elizabeth bishop. miss elizabeth bishop. lizzy. ms. bishop. bishie bish. love of my life! elizabeth,

if “somebody loves us all” then i’m the somebody who loves you. it’s me & u to the end. would follow u anywhere!!! ur ruining my life.

with love,
grace


some snippets of lines i rly loved:

“then from the lids one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips”

“and we remained unchanged together for a year, a minute, an hour”

“what right have you to give commands and tell us how to live” (in reference to a rooster)

“we can sit down and weep; we can go shopping, or play at a game of constantly being wrong with a priceless set of vocabularies, or we can bravely deplore, but please please come flying”

“oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too?”

“But surely it would have been a pity not to have seen the trees along this road”

“patch upon patch up one patch, your wife keeps all of you covered”

“i scarcely dared to look to see what it was i was”

“home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?”

“why didn’t I know enough of something?”

“i’d like to retire there and do nothing, or nothing much, forever”

“costume and custom are complex”

these are obviously out of context but still!!! she’s fabulous and everyone should read her!!


disclaimer: i didn’t technically “finish” this collection because I didn’t read Elizabeth’s translations of other poems, but I read all of her own work so i’m counting it

[Neira · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be fair I've only read a handful of poems but I've really enjoyed them, Bishop is exquisitely evocative and poetic without being puzzling.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this after reading a Paris Review interview with her. I should read it all again, but just the beauty of the language and the acute observation is astonishing.

[Abe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spectacular, insightful, vivid.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

The 1955 volume POEMS reissued Elizabeth Bishop's debut collection North and South, but it also contained an entirely new collection titled A Cold Spring. One of the best places to get this material is the Library of America volume (ISBN 1598530178) that contains Bishop's complete poems and prose with a choice of letters, but I have found it interesting to slowly examine Bishop's collections on their own.

North and South was published in 1946, but of the poems predate the war (or at least American involvement in it) and reflect Bishop's development as a poet through the 1930s and very early 1940s. From the very first poem, "The Map", we find Bishop's distinctive concern with describing specific scenes in detail, that then give way to some kind of universal, transcendental experience. After various musings on the printers' layout of the eponymous map, the poem ends: "Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is, / lending the land their waves' own conformation: / and Norway's hare runs south in agitation, / profiles investigate the sea, where land is. / Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors? / -- What suits the characters or the native waters best. / Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West. / More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors."

And the best poems in North and South continue this style. "Roosters", acclaimed by Robert Lowell as the best work by an American female poet, goes from describing the dawn chorus around Bishop's home to meditations on tribal violence and religious salvation. "The Fish" recounts a victory during an angling trip, only to ultimately make a point about how insignificant such victories are. And there's humour here to, such as in "Large Bad Picture" where Bishop meditates on her great-uncle's painting, only eliptically revealing how bad it is.

Only Bishop's dabbling in surrealism in "The Weed" and "The Man-Moth" marks this collection with a certain immaturity. But still, this is an impressive debut, and Bishop's poetry has a music to it that should appeal to a wide public. The only difficulty comes in reviewing it: Bishop's poetry is so concerned with a twist somewhere towards the end of a poem that her poems can only be quoted in full.

The second collection, A Cold Spring, consists of poems written in the 1940s and early 1950s. Here too we Bishop's careful eye for detail, basing a whole poem on a pensive contemplation of one small object or scene, but it also includes a number of striking poems based on turbulent personal relationships. "O Breath" and "Insomnia" are nighttime meditations on problems with a lover. "View of the Capitol of the Library of Congress" is an amusing jab at politics from a literary intellectual. Some of the poems in A Cold Spring are among my favourite English-language poems, but it's a pity that in a review one cannot quote at length those many lines that have so touched your heart.

[Daniel Recasens Salvador · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hi ha en la poesia de la Bishop una lletjor bonica, una cruesa dolcíssima que quan enumera es fa retrat, quan descriu és pura violència, desesper, agror.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling finger-tips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

— Sonnet, 1928 (from Poems written in youth)

[kenneth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nearly all of these poems are remarkable in some way. Bishop deftly handles fixed forms, such as the sonnet and the sestina, and her villanelle "One Art" has been lingering in my mind for awhile. Her verses in open form are well chiseled sculptures. She can shift her creative focus from the quotidian to the marvelous and leave the reader the better for it.
Some more favorites include "The Hanging of the Mouse" and "Roosters".
Also notable are her translations of other poets, including "The Table" and "Don't Kill Yourself" by Carlos Drummond de Andrade.

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

it's grown on me but I still wish I liked it more. Bishop's poems are beautiful but personally not telling me much.