Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box

Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments

Bishop Elizabeth

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.

About the Author

Elizabeth Bishop is one of the best-loved American poets of the century. She won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award during her lifetime. Her "Complete Poems", her "Collected Prose and One Art: Collected Letters" are published by Chatto and Windus. A book of her uncollected poems, drafts and fragments, "Edgar Allan Poe" and the "Juke-Box", edited by Alice Quinn, is published by Carcanet Press.

Reviews

"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

"Beautifully and fascinatingly annotated...you can see the great poems themselves emerging. A complete treasure-house" – Sam Leith, The Telegraph

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