Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments - Hardcover

"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
Praise for "The Complete Poems"
"Of all the splendid and curious works belonging to my time, these are the poems that I love best and tire of least." --James Merrill, "The Washington Post Book World "

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"

Of all the splendid and curious works belonging to my time, these are the poems that I love best and tire of least. "James Merrill, The Washington Post Book World on Complete Poems""

"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

"Of all the splendid and curious works belonging to my time, these are the poems that I love best and tire of least." --James Merrill, The Washington Post Book World on Complete Poems

Perishable, adorable friends
each sometime ends.
--undated fragment

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 & 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 she exercised, keeping poems for years in mindful abeyance, and releasing only those that lived up to her exacting standard.