Poetry
Poems: North & South — A Cold Spring
Elizabeth Bishop · 1955
Synopsis
The volume brings together two collections. The first, published in 1946, opens with a map and passes through Paris, Florida and Key West: a moth-man, roosters at dawn, a large fish pulled from the water and observed at length. The second adds the new poems of “A Cold Spring”: a spring that is slow to come in Maryland, a bay, fishermen's houses in Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, the view of the Capitol from the Library of Congress, an insomnia. Nothing is said of the author; everything comes through what she sees.
Context
The first set, North & South, had received the Houghton Mifflin poetry prize in 1945, from among some eight hundred candidates, and had appeared nine years before this volume. The 1955 volume completes it with the pieces of A Cold Spring, seventeen or eighteen depending on the sources; it is this combined volume that received the Pulitzer Prize in 1956. Bishop kept some poems in progress for twenty years and refused to appear in anthologies of women poets.
Who it is for
Two collections brought together, to be read separately. Translated into French by Claire Malroux in two volumes, in 1996 and in 2003.
Prizes and reception
Pulitzer Prize 1956, awarded to the two collections taken together rather than to either one on its own.
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