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

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.