Edgar Allen Poe and the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments

Description

From the mid-1930s to 1978 Elizabeth Bishop published some eighty poems and thirty translations. Yet her notebooks reveal that she embarked upon many more compositions, some existing in only fragmentary form but many embodied in extensive drafts. "Edgar Allen Poe and the Juke-Box" presents, alongside a facsimile of the notebook page from which they are drawn, poems Bishop began soon after college, reflecting her passion for Elizabethan verse and surrealist technique; love poems and dream fragments from the 1940s; poems about her Canadian childhood; and many other works that have heretofore been quoted almost exclusively in biographical and critical studies. This revelatory and moving selection brings us into the poet's laboratory, showing us the initial provocative images that moved her to begin a poem, illustrating terrain unexplored in the work published during her lifetime, and revealing the kind of artistic resolution required for her to keep a poem, sometimes for many years, in mindful abeyance.

Elizabeth Bishop is one of the best-loved American poets of the twentieth century. She won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award during her lifetime. Her Complete Poems and One Art: Collected Letters are published by Chatto & Windus. Alice Quinn has been Poetry Editor of The New Yorker since 1987 and is currently director of the Poetry Society of America. She is also deputy editor of the fiction desk and a professor of poetry at the Graduate School of the Arts at Columbia University, New York. Before joining the magazine she worked as an editor at Alfred A. Knopf publishers, where she edited the Knopf Poetry Series, as well as works of fiction by Ann Arensberg, Steven Millhauser and Celia Gittelson; and works of nonfiction, including Ann Douglas's 'The Feminization of American Culture'.

'For those who love Elizabeth Bishop, there can never be enough of her writing. The arrival of this trove of unknown manuscripts is therefore a stupendous event.' - John Ashbery. '[The book] will be cherished by those who love [Bishop's] work.' - Publishers Weekly.