‘The Mysteries of Falling Asleep and the Oddness of Waking Up in the Morning’
BISHOP, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems London: Chatto and Windus. 1969.
8vo. Original blue cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dust-jacket designed by Roxanne Cum-ming, priced £2.25 / 45s net to front flap; printed on laid paper; pp. [vii], 216; light rubbing to spine tips and corners, faint spotting to fore-edge of page-block, wrapper lightly rubbed to extremities, else a near fine copy.
A smart first UK edition of one of the indispensable poetry books of the twentieth century.
Containing three of the four perfectly formed collections published by Elizabeth Bishop during her lifetime, North and South (1946), A Cold Spring (1955), and Questions of Travel (1965) (Geography III followed in 1976, three years before she died), this, the first Collected Bishop, was greeted with re-markable critical acclaim, winning the National Book Award for Poetry in 1970.
Reviewing the book in the New York Times (1 June 1969), John Ashbery observed that although the volume ‘runs to a little more than 200 pages, […] the proportion of pure poetry in it outweighs many a chunky collected volume from our established poets’.
He singles out Bishop’s attention to ‘the life of dreams, always regarded with suspicion as too “French” in American poetry; the little mysteries of falling asleep and the oddness of waking up in the morning’, her ‘diversions and reflections on French clocks and mechanical toys that recall Marianne Moore’.
The US edition was published April 29, 1969 in an edition of 5500 copies, swiftly going through a number of reprints. This first UK edition (offset from the third impression of the US edition, with a near-identical jacket) appeared on October 29, 1970, in a more modest edition of 1000 copies.
MacMahon A9. (b1).
SKU: 2124427