From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This book is as much Alice Quinn's as Elizabeth Bishop's. The
New Yorker poetry editor spent countless hours with the 3,500 pages of Bishop (1911–1979) material housed in the Vassar College library, and particularly with two notebooks that contain drafts from the period 1936–1948, which, Quinn says in an introduction, furnished the "kernel" of the book. None of the material (aside from "One Art," of which 16 drafts are included as an example of Bishop's exacting process) was marked by Bishop for publication but, as Quinn notes, much of it has been quoted extensively by Bishop scholars. Quinn, who also directs the Poetry Society of America, hopes this volume "will provide an adventure for readers who love the established canon," and it is, indeed, a fan's book. But it also contains some terrific lines and images; a few fully realized poems that will eventually enter the Bishop canon; and a delicious look into Bishop's thinking and composition—seeing a bad Bishop poem is a revelation. There are 108 poems (seven less than the
Collected), 11 prose pieces, the "One Art,"some sketches and other visual art, drafts and 120 pages of Quinn's excellent notes. Some of the poems are fragmentary; many contain Bishop's own question marks and possible substitutions; all will be cherished by those who love her work.
(Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Review
"You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop . . . nothing matches the impact of a great artist, and in the second half of the 20th century, no American artist in any medium was greater than Bishop (1911-79). That she worked in one of our country's least popular fields, poetry, doesn't matter. That she was a woman doesn't matter. That she was gay doesn't matter. That she was an alcoholic, and expatriate and essentially an orphan--none of this matters. What matters is that she left behind a body of work that teaches us, as Italo Calvino once said of literature generally, 'a method subtle and flexible enough to be the same thing as an absence of any method whatever.' The publication of Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, which gathers for the first time Bishop's unpublished material, isn't just a significant event in our poetry; it's part of a continuing alteration in the scale of American life . . . Quinn's notes throughout are superb . . . This is the devoted editing this material needed and deserved." -David Orr, The New York Times Book Review (cover review)
