The Collected Prose

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 278 pages
• Published by: Farrar, Straus and Giroux November 1, 1984
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0374518556
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0374518554
• Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Weighs: 12 ounces

Product Review
Farrar, Straus and Giroux first published Elizabeth Bishop's Collected Prose in 1984, five years after the poet's death. It's now too late to ask whether this deeply private lady would have allowed such an act, let alone approved of the biographies and studies that have begun to appear. It's not too late, however, to praise her editor's decision to gather her fiction and nonfiction together. Without it we would not have the dreamlike "The Sea & Its Shore" (in which a man hired to rid the beach of trash tries to make sense of each scrap of writing he comes upon) or memoirs such as "Primer Class," which begins, "Every time I see long columns of numbers, handwritten in a certain way, a strange sensation or shudder, partly aesthetic, partly painful goes through my diaphragm." Precise as ever, Bishop continues, "It is like seeing the dorsal fin of a large fish suddenly cut through the surface of the water." The collection's two standouts are "Efforts of Affection," a memoir of her mentor Marianne Moore, and the comic masterwork "The U.S.A. School of Writing." The latter is a sly recollection of her first job--at a deeply dodgy correspondence school. "Henry James once said that he who would aspire to be a writer must inscribe on his banner the one word 'Loneliness.' In the case of my students, their need was not to ward off society, but to get into it."

Product Review
"The Collected Prose appears in the same spruce format as The Complete Poems, and it doubles what we possess of Bishop's writing. Robert Giroux [her longtime editor and friend] has arranged the book according to a sketch found among Bishop's papers after her death; he has reconstructed from nearly complete fragments her pungent memoir of her mentor, Marianne Moore; and in his affectionate introduction, he has brought to life the circumstances under which these pieces were written. . . . It is no exaggeration to say that these stories will be read beside her poems, as Keat's letters are beside his. . . . 'The Sea & Its Shore' and 'In Prison' [are] worthy of Kafka or Poe."--David Kalstone, The New York Times Book Review

"A stunning collection. . . . These are the kind of stories you should linger over, savor, and rediscover again and again."--Elin Schoen, Mademoiselle

"A record of merciless observation, full of surprises both tragic and comic. . . . Again and again, in these pages, it is the precision that astonishes. . . . So often what Bishop gives us are these small, exact glimpses of the mundane, shorn of all rhetorical indulgence. But when looking is thus transformed, will any word but 'vision' do?"--April Bernard, Newsday
-- Review

Reader Reviews
I hope that I will be forgiven for saying that as much as I enjoyed this volume of Bishop's prose, I still don't find it as robust as her poetry. While lovely, some of these entries were so slight I was afraid to breathe and break them. The book is divided into two halves-- a series of memories and a series of stories. I liked the memories section the best: particularly "The Country Mouse" and her memoir of Marianne Moore. Of the stories, I liked "Gwendolyn" the best-- a story about a dying little girl (which is not nearly as saccharine as it sounds from that description.) I enjoyed this book, I *think* I enjoyed it in its own right. But if I'm honest, I'm not sure how I would have felt about it had I not already loved Bishop's poems so much.