Bishop published only 101 poems in her lifetime and every one is perfect. Her precision (the accuracy of a fish's "iridescent" skin, the exact way a waterspout looks moving across the ocean) is matched by an emotional restraint that makes her grief, when it arrives in "One Art," hit like a hammer. Robert Lowell called her the best poet of their generation. The art of losing.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.