Dumbfoundry points us to a New Yorker slide show (Flash) of poetry editor Alice Quinn discussing the release of a collection of previously unpublished Elizabeth Bishop poems, drafts, and fragments: Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke Box. The slide show is full of terrific photographs, illustrations, and revealing images of (the reluctant) Bishop's handwritten drafts. If you like, you can skip right to the end, where Quinn reads four selected poems.

Here's an example of an hour's labor after work, typical of a take I bring home a couple of nights a week:

• How the Heart Will Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War, by Heather Bryant Johnson (University of Michigan Press, 1992). Quotes Reed's review of Bowen's "Everything's Frightfully Interesting" (also known also "Careless Talk," which makes fun of self-important men doing top secret work for the War Office), from her collection of short stories The Demon Lover.


• Sursum Corda! The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, v. I: 1926-1946, and v. II: 1947-1957, edited by Sherrill E. Grace (University of Toronto Press, 1995-1996). Lowry apparently wrote a radio adaptation of Moby Dick in 1945, but after eight months hadn't heard back from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, by which time Reed's version had been produced by the BBC.


• The Eighth Lively Art: Conversations with Painters, Poets, Musicians, and the Wicked Witch of the West, by Wesley Wehr (University of Washington Press, 2000). Wehr remembers Elizabeth Bishop teaching at the University of Washington in the mid-1960s, the same time as Reed.


• Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry, by David Bromwich (University of Chicago Press, 2001). Mentions Reed's poem "Hiding Beneath the Furze" appearing in Robin Skelton's 1964 anthology, Poetry of the Thirties.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go fill out index cards for this evening's bounty.