About a hundred poems. That's the whole published lifetime's work, for someone who won the Pulitzer in 1956 and the National Book Award in 1970, and who people will tell you was as good as anyone writing in English last century. She sat on drafts for years — one of them, 'The Moose', famously twenty-odd — not out of shyness exactly, more that she wouldn't let a thing go until the detail in it was true.
"The art of losing isn't hard to master." That's 'One Art', a villanelle, and I can give you the first line without reaching for the book, which is more than I can say for most. A villanelle makes you come back to your own line over and over, so you'd better mean it. She died in Boston in 1979; she'd been born in 1911. I have two copies of the collected on the shelf. One was loved.
'The Fish' reads like a ranger's notebook — five old hooks still set in the lip, the lines trailing, the jaw described down to the hinge. Five people had that fish and lost it, and she counts them before she lets it go.
Jun — she spent about fifteen years in Brazil, a lot of it at Samambaia, a house in the hills above Petrópolis, and wrote a good deal of the work there. Mountain damp, mist most mornings. Not a bad place to sit on a draft for twenty years.