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

by Elizabeth Bishop

Book Overview

From the mid-1930s to 1978 Elizabeth Bishop published some ninety poems and thirty translations. Yet her notebooks reveal that she embarked upon many more compositions, some existing in only fragmentary form and some embodied in extensive drafts. Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box presents, alongside facsimiles of many notebook pages from which they are drawn, poems Bishop began soon after college, reflecting her passion for Elizabethan verse and surrealist...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374530769
• ISBN13: 9780374530761
• Release Date: March 2007
• Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Hidden treasures of a great artist

The question regarding whether to publish the unpublished work of great authors is indeed a vexing one, especially in this case since the poet evidently chose not to release these. However, just as in the case of the notebooks of great philosophers such as Kant and Nietzsche, one often gleans riches from their fragments. Elizabeth Bishop is a great poet, and there are treasures of all kinds here--images, rhythms, narratives.

Gems from among the leavings

This rather strangely titled book is a tribute to the demand for Elizabeth Bishop's work. It is a set of pieces gleaned from some 3,500 pages in the Vassar College library collection. Not exactly random (but almost) here are 108 poems, some prose, notes she took, some sketches, some facimilies of her papers, some sketches she made, and other pieces harder to describe. Obviously this is a book that will appeal most to people who are already Elizabeth Bishop fans. This is more of a work in process. It tells more about her as a person, it illustrates the great effort she went to get her poems just right before sending them off for publication. It shows something of the way her mind worked. The work here is not Ms. Bishop's best. It's unfinished. Some of the shorter pieces, fragments really, make you wonder where she might have taken it.

The Making Of A Poet

Elizabeth Bishop published less than 100 poems prior to her death in 1979. This new collection is similiar to a box CD set of studio out-takes of a rock musician : not essential for the causal reader but a must for a true believer of the artist. It is the definitive edition of her unpublished work with extensive notes and annotations. Some of her private poetry is considerably more erotic and emotional than her previously published work and the new poems (over 100+) are the reason to buy this edition. Having said this, the reader is referred to "The Complete Poems, 1927-1979" (1983) of Elizabeth Bishop.