Poems

This is the definitive centenary edition of the work of one of America's greatest poets, recognised today as a master of her art and acclaimed by poets and readers alike. Her poems display honesty and humour, grief and acceptance, observing nature and human nature with painstaking accuracy. They often start outwardly, with geography and landscape - from New England and Nova Scotia, where Bishop grew up, to Florida and Brazil, where she later lived - and move inexorably toward the interior, exploring questions of knowledge and perception, love and solitude, and the ability or inability of form to control chaos.