GEOGRAPHY III

First edition, first printing. Original brown cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dustwrapper designed by Cynthia Krupat. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. There are a few faint spots to the fore-edge of the page block. Complete with the sharp, fresh dustwrapper, fine except for a couple of light surface marks. Not price-clipped ($7.95 to the upper edge of the front flap). A lovely copy.

'Geography III', Bishop's fourth and final volume of poems is, like its predecessors – North & South (1946), A Cold Spring (1955), and Questions of Travel (1965) – the fruit of over a decade's work. Short and perfectly formed, it contains many of her most celebrated poems ('In the Waiting Room', 'The Moose', the villanelle 'One Art', to name just three). The epigraph to the book is a quirky series of questions and answers drawn from James Monteith's 'First Lessons in Geography' (1884), a copy of which was gifted to Bishop by fellow poet John Ashbery early in 1976. In his book on Ashbery, John Shoptaw cites the postcard, dated April 27, in which Bishop thanks him for the gift: "The geography book is wonderful. I can't quite believe it's real, it is so apt. I may use some of its questions & answers as a POEM, or a foreword, to my book." As his writings on Bishop make clear, Ashbery was in awe of Bishop, but 'Geography III' touchingly shows influence travelling in the other direction – Bishop's 'Crusoe in England' (completed in early 1970) almost certainly takes as its cue Ashbery's long poem 'The Skaters' (from 'Rivers and Mountains', 1966). Appropriately enough, the jacket of 'Geography III' prints part of Ashbery's text sponsoring Bishop for the 1976 Books Abroad /Neustadt International Prize for Literature (Bishop would be the first American and first woman to be awarded the prize): "The extraordinary thing about Miss Bishop is that she is both a public and a private poet, or perhaps it is that her poetry by its very existence renders obsolete these two after all artificial distinctions (artificial insofar as poetry is concerned). The private self—the quirkiness, the rightness of vision, the special sights and events (a moose, a filling station) that have intrigued Miss Bishop to the point of poetry—melts imperceptibly into the larger utterance, the grandeur of poetry, which, because it remains rooted in everyday particulars, never sounds 'grand', but is as quietly convincing as honest speech." 'Geography III' was published on 28 December 1976 in an edition of 7500 copies. (John Shoptaw, 'On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery's Poetry', Cambridge MA: 1995; MacMahon A13).