A robust first edition copy of the scarcer British edition of Elizabeth Bishop’s complete poems, comprising North & South, A Cold Spring, and Questions of Travel, with added dedications, plus ‘Translations from the Portuguese’ and ‘New and Uncollected Work’; 1000 copies were published on October 29, 1970.
The British edition adds on the front DJ flap: “Winner of the National Book Award,” while the back flap matter is different from the US blurb.
Roxanne Cumming, who designed the dust jacket, is also the name Megan Marshall uses for the younger woman Bishop met in Seattle in 1966, during her first semester’s teaching, and who became her lover; Brett Millier refers to her as Suzanne Bowen. Is the dust jacket designer, then, one and the same Roxanne Cumming? Bishop and Cumming lived together from late 1967, following Lota de Macedo Soares’ death – “a disastrous relationship that lasted roughly two more years”; the American edition of The Complete Poems had been published in 1969.
MacMahon A9.[b1]; Brett C. Millier (1993) Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the memory of it (Berkeley: UoCalifornia Press); Megan Marshall (2017) Elizabeth Bishop: A miracle for breakfast (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
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