This very day, Farrar, Straus and Giroux is issuing three separate volumes of her work: Poems (368 pp., $16); Prose (528 pp., $20) (hardcover boxed edition of both, $75); plus Elizabeth Bishop and the New Yorker: Complete Correspondence (496 pp., $35).
Also notable, from 2008: the inspiring Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 928 pp., $45).
"She's become much more of a public figure since her death," says Lloyd Schwartz, a friend of the poet's in the 1970s and the editor of Prose. "We've been aching to celebrate her."
Bishop is even a movie star now. Millions watched as, in the 2005 film In Her Shoes, Cameron Diaz read Bishop's famed poem "One Art" to a man on his deathbed - "The art of losing isn't hard to master" - and discussed it with him. (Schwartz says Bishop "would have loved knowing her poetry would be in the movies.") In Brazil, the closest thing she ever had to a real home, they're making a biopic about her, A Arte De Perder - The Art of Losing.
Bishop, who called writing poetry "an unnatural act," was an obsessive perfectionist, keeping poems for years, publishing only about 80 in her lifetime. But for many readers, they're indelible.
In poems such as "The Fish" and "The Armadillo," she emerges as one of the greatest descriptive poets in English. In "Cape Breton," she writes of
thousands of light song-sparrow songs floating upward
freely, dispassionately, through the mist, and meshing
in brown-wet, fine, torn fish-nets.
In "The Moose," a bus leaves a moose ("Towering, antlerless,/ high as a church, / homely as a house") behind on a lonely road:
the moose can be seen
