Broadside poem, first edition, first impression, and the first separate printing, being a presentation copy from apparently only eight copies signed by the poet, this example being undoubtedly the most important example ever to appear on the market, signed and inscribed to her close friend and fellow poet, Frank Bidart. 13 x 9 inches. Toning, mounting stains to corners, overall fine. Framed and glazed. 

First published in 1940 in Partisan Review and subsequently in Bishop’s first collection, North & South (1946), “The Fish” was one of Bishop’s earliest and most successful poems. Robert Lowell praised the poem, along with “The Rooster”, in his 1947 review of North & South as “the best poems that I know of written by a woman in this century”.

MacMahon records that David Ishii, a bookseller and fisherman, commissioned this unauthorized printing in anticipation of Bishop delivering the Roethke Memorial Reading in May 1974. According to MacMahon, she signed 12 copies: “Seven copies were distributed; five remain in the possession of Mr. Ishii. One unsigned copy belongs to the printer. None are for sale”.  Bookseller, Taylor Bowie, whose mother was Assistant to the Chair of the English Dept. at University of Washington, was a friend of Bishop's and it recalls somewhat differently: "Ishii...asked me if I thought I could get her to sign some of them and I said I would ask when she was next in Seattle. Elizabeth was very hesitant about doing so and was worried that she would get in trouble if Bob Giroux heard about it…both the printing and the possible signing of some copies. But after we discussed it a while,  she agreed to sign some for David.  As I recall,  she signed only five for David and took three copies for herself….one of which she gave to her friend Frank." Although OCLC records no locations for the broadside, Vassar College Library and the Carter Burden Collection at the Pierpont Morgan Library each have a copy. (MacMahon, “Appendix II, Unauthorized Printing”, pp. 210-211) 

During her lifetime, poet Elizabeth Bishop was a respected yet somewhat obscure figure in the world of American literature. Since her death in 1979, however, her reputation has grown to the point that many critics, like Larry Rohter in the New York Times, have referred to her as "one of the most important American poets" of the 20th century. Bishop was a perfectionist who did not write prolifically, preferring instead to spend long periods of time polishing her work. Her status as one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century is based on the smallest of oeuvres. Some 70 poems were published in her lifetime in four very slim volumes. Her verse is marked by precise descriptions of the physical world and an air of poetic serenity, but her underlying themes include the struggle to find a sense of belonging, and the human experiences of grief and longing. She died in 1979, aware that her reputation was steadily increasing, eclipsing that of her close friend and fellow poet Robert Lowell. Since her death and the publication of two superb volumes of her correspondence, One Art and Words in Air(letters between her and Lowell) it has grown ever more secure. In the select pantheon of 20th-century poets writing in English, she is placed with TS Eliot, WB Yeats, Wallace Stevens and WH Auden. Her poems often took her years to write and complete, and their formal perfection and the simple, limpid accuracy of their language have always drawn the admiration of other poets. John Ashbery called her "the writer's writer's writer."

From the library of the important American poet Frank Bidart, who received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, and the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry for his book Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016. Frank Bidart was a student and collaborator of Robert Lowell, eventually becoming a close friend and amanuensis to the elder poet, later co-editing Lowell's Collected Poems. It was through Lowell that Bidart met Elizabeth Bishop,  and "Lowell and Bishop became muses of a sort for Bidart...Lowell and Bishop were less teachers than parents of his own choosing, who encouraged him to become the artist he couldn’t be back home. 'I knew that knowing them—and the fact that, in some sense, they had needed me, an eager kid from Bakersfield obsessed with poetry and art, in their life—was the most unlikely gift.'" (Hilton Als, "Frank Bidart's Poetry of Saying the Unsaid," New Yorker magazine, September 4, 2017)