Elizabeth BishopReviews

I don't have the time to do more than sample now... but I must admit that most seems beyond me. I rather liked "Insomnia" but I have a feeling I'm grasping for the easy interpretation and if I read more deeply it'd make an entirely different interpretation. I also liked the one about the owl who proves he can count, because he repeats himself in phrases of five, over and over again... but unfortunately I didn't mark it & don't remember where in the volume it was. Anyway, I doubt I'll read more by her unless she is rec'd to me afresh.

This is a book I'll keep dipping into in front of the fire, the poems at hand, without concern for finishing.

Thought I would love this collection but I was left feeling lukewarm. While In the Waiting Room and Night City were my favorites, I didn't really feel much for the other poems.

Possibly my favorite poem of all time, "Skunk Hour" by Robert Lowell, is dedicated to Elizabeth Bishop, so I had to check her out.

Many of these poems are impressionistic, capturing a moment - like "Late Air". Some use extended metaphor, like "The Unbeliever" - taking a line from John Bunyan about the dangers of unbelief and twisting it into something different - making it seem that the atheist is both able to dream differently than those on the deck below:

Asleep he was transported there
asleep he curled
in a gilded ball at the mast's top,
or climbed inside
a gilded bird, or blindly seated himself astride

The metaphor becomes something strange and mysterious - what is the unbeliever? A dreamer? A sage?

Bishop likes to weave natural imagery in with the emotions and ideas expressed in her poems - a classic example is "The Fish", where the defeat of the veteran fish by the fisherman is problematized by the imagery of the decrepit boat, where there is a "pool of bilge / where oil had spread a rainbow / around the rusted engine"

The fish is something noble battling against the crude ugly trappings of man.

I have never read correspondence before (except in epistolary novels) so I was pleasantly surprised by how readable it was. These letters cover a 30 year span which allows the reader to really get to know Bishop and Lowell. I would recommend either reading their poetry first or having it handy to refer to as (not surprisingly) there are a lot of references to specific poems (even to specific lines or words in the poems).

Elizabeth Bishop’s collected poems – her life’s work – can be read in a single afternoon. It will take a lot longer than that to ponder its meaning, test it against one’s own life experience, and see oneself reflected in these lines and stanzas. Although the settings change with Bishops’ extensive travels, some themes thread throughout her work – ships and sailors battling rough seas, weary laborers, unrequited or unfulfilled loves and lovers. It’s evident from the frequent biblical allusions that Bishop had a religious education, and it’s also evident Bishop found no solace in religion.

Among the most intriguing poems to me are the ones addressed to Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore. It would be interesting to explore how these highly regarded poets influenced each other’s work.½

I only made it through 1947-1951. It was visits with Ezra Pound, stays in Key West on the Hemmingway property and stays at Yaddo with the likes of Flannery O'Connor, stays on the rocky coast of Novia Scotia. Coercing Dylan Thomas to make a recording of his work for the poetry collection at the Library of Congress, because that's where you work. Attending a reception for Edith and Osbert Sitwell at New York City's Gotham Book Mart with Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Tennessee Williams, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Randall Jarred and others. Can you imagine? Mental breakdown, asthmatic collapse, failed marriage. The graffiti in Florence, Italy, reads: "Death to the criminal MacArthur," but back in New York your dissecting stanza 5, line 7 of the Kavanaughs. Don't even get me started on Harcourt Brace. 1951-1977 and trips to Brazil with Aldous Huxley for another time. After all, 811 pages of letters isn't exactly summer reading.

I liked this one better than some of the other Modernist poems I had to read. It was very interesting how Bishop used the colors... the color of its tattered skin, the colors of the barnacles and sea lice covering it, the seaweed, the yellowing eyes, the fishing lines hanging from its jaw, even the oily rainbow at the bottom of the boat and orange of the rust. She also uses color to vividly describe what she imagines the inside of the fish will look like: the white flesh, the black and red entrails, and the pink swim bladder. And all of that comes together to form the rainbow at the end when she decides to let the fish go.

Elizabeth Bishop waited until she was thirty-five to publish her first book of poetry, North & South. It contains thirty poems, which open this volume of her complete poems. The first poem, “Maps”, immediately drew me in. It is a naive, almost child-like look at something familiar through strange eyes. The following poem, “Imaginary Iceberg”, presents the conundrum of preferring the iceberg to the ship. Do we prize approaching danger to a safe conveyance? I took it more generally: What we see in front of us interests us more than where we stand. Yet the title refers to an imaginary iceberg, which is related to the soul in the last stanza.
Taken together, these two poems suggested to me, in different ways, the task of the poet: to look at the familiar with fresh eyes and to question the relation of representation to that which it ostensibly represents.
There are more standout poems in this first collection, “Roosters” and “Seascape”, for example. There are recurrent themes, such as the sea and the coast, and Bible references abound. Bishop evokes the places in which her poems are set with precision. The settings vary from the New England coast to Paris to Key West.
Nine years later, Bishop presented A Cold Spring, which contains nineteen poems. She revisits familiar places (“Cape Breton”), but there are poems set in Greenwich Village and Washington, D. C., where she was poetry consultant to the Library of Congress.
Both collections garnered Pulitzer Prizes, and Bishop relocated to Brazil, where more than half the poems of her following collection, Questions of Travel (1965), are set. These poems reflect the lush vegetation in which she found herself and the precarious hold the poor have on life.
Bishop published only one more collection in her lifetime, Geography III (1977). In addition to these four collections, this edition includes four new poems and several unpublished pieces, including several written in her youth. Although these don’t yet reflect her mature voice, she was already an accomplished poet; these can’t be dismissed as juvenilia. Rounding out the anthology are her translations from Portuguese, Spanish, and French.
Bishop’s poems reflect the detailed observation and precise expression that mark great poetry. She enabled me to see places I’ve never been and to share in the emotions her experience of those places evoked. I enjoyed reading this collection.

Definitely the best selection of Elizabeth's work in print. Bishop's poetry is the deep authenticity of a writer who knew exactly what she was and never tried to seem otherwise. Her work is never pretentious or inflated. Poetry lovers lament that she has written few works. However, there are authors who don't need to write much to show the world their genius. She is among them.

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NA

I felt that these poems left me uninspired and were lacking in the things that make poetry, for me, great. There was no great imagery, admirable passages, and sentient contemplation. Therefore, it was hard for me to enjoy the poems and I felt that this was more of a chore to read than something of fulfillment and enjoyment. For this reason, I give it a low ranking.

2 stars.

Maybe the best American poet of the 20th century. I'm trying to memorize these.

Elizabeth Bishop is not just a good poet but a great one. Bishop accomplished the magical illumination of the ordinary, forcing us to examine our surroundings with the freshness of the friendly alien.

I don't tend to read poetry but "The Fish," by Elizabeth Bishop, is one of my favorites. Strolling through the library, I decided to pick up a collection of hers and I very much enjoyed it. Her poetic voice rings true for me personally, and I connect to the rhythm and words to most of her works viscerally. The last section of this collection I skipped. It was called "translations," and each poem appeared to be a work translated to English by another author. I was more interested in her own poems, so I read up to that last section. I don't remember all poem styles or functions, but even so, with my limited schooling on poetry and my casual reading, and like her work very much.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

That very thought has occurred to me on occasion. This collection was a slow start. The images were dense, looped and anchored in rocky soil. There was a trace of fear upon entry: a hesitation. Perhaps there was a benefit; I know nothing about Bishop’s biography, though I’m guessing there were extensive travels to Brazil. It was Teju Cole who pointed the way. He has proved a reliable curator.

Bishop's poetry is masterful.

In central Ohio
somewhere east of the capital
I went with E.B.
to keep an appointment
and she spoke to me of many things:
We're all "in the waiting room"
was one of them,
an aside that I handled with fair
words of praise.
Bristle not when I bring up
John Livingston Lowes
who is said to have said
"Free verse may be written as very beautiful prose;
prose may be written as very beautiful free verse.
Which is which?"
this de-constructor of Xanadu who
plumbed Coleridge's creative fountain,
giving double-edged acclaim.
Reading her book of poems I felt
a "sweet sensation of joy" and that is all
there is to it.

I really enjoyed reading through Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, although I didn't read all of them thoroughly. I just read to get an idea of her style and the initial feeling of the works. I didn't really dissect them to find deep meaning; I just wanted to read them for entertainment and to understand the flow of poetry a little better. She has some very interesting material.

A friend of mine recently divulged his personal favorite among Bishop’s poems, "The End of March," which I immediately sought out, the end of March bearing some significance to me, now. I’d always thought of Elizabeth Bishop as a short story writer, and having sought out the Library of America edition of her collected poems, prose, and letters, I discover that I like best of all her essays, which read to me like her poems must read to others. Her essays are the real thing—life--in color, with context, in language as carefully chosen as any of her poems. She manages to pick among the all the true things in an experience for particular words which tell us volumes…she was a careful curator of the authentic, one with a true artist’s eye.

Bishop has a fearful darkness at the core of her writing. I don’t know why—it almost seems as though she must have an illness that tired her and reminded her how close nothingness is. I did not read any biography of her; perhaps I should. Why it is that poets can make blackness blacker than any other artists, I could not say. But even in her short stories, for instance "The Last Animal," there is an air of menace, a whiff of death. In the essay, "Gregorio Valdes, 1879-1939" we know right from the title that the character we read about is dead, or will die, as it happened. We had forgotten that at the promising start, all hot sun and bright flowers, the shade of palms and the act of creation (paintings) make us forget that death is waiting, and not patiently.

The poem, "The End of March," it shouldn’t surprise us, then, is also about death. Walking along the beach with a cold biting wind freezing one side of the face, the walkers come upon a "man-sized" tangle of kite string "but no kite" washed up on the shore. At the same time, one walker glimpses a boarded-up beach house tethered by a wire (electricity?) to something off beyond the dunes. The walker imagines a retirement there,

"....doing nothing,
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:
look through binoculars, read boring books,
old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,
talk to myself, and, foggy days,
watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light."

Robert Pinsky was asked in The New Yorker poetry podcast to choose a poem to read from the New Yorker archives and he chose a Bishop poem first published in that magazine in 1947. Called “At the Fishhouses,” the poem Pinsky calls "plain" has something of the “cold dark deep and absolutely clear” description that she reprises more than once.

"…I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
Slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
Icily free above the stones…
…It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
Dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
Drawn from the cold hard mouth
Of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
Forever, flowing and drawn, and since
Our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown."

As it often happens in the way of things, Colm Tóibín has recently published a book with Princeton University Press, On Elizabeth Bishop, whom he has been reading for forty years. Tóibín shares his thoughts on Elizabeth Bishop and the poet Thom Gunn in this article in The Guardian. Also in The Guardian, Lavinia Greenlaw reviews Tóibín's new book. Each of these yields great insights into Bishop's life and style.

Her words surprise me, continually. Some favorites: Keaton, Close close all night, A Short Slow Life, A Drunkard

For what it's worth, here's what Clive James thinks:
"So start at the back (of a book). It’s pretty good advice. If an artist is any good at all, then he or she will have a later phase that’s more interesting than the early one. A great American poet like Elizabeth Bishop, for example, she is like that. Elizabeth Bishop’s last (poems) are just beyond wonderful"
- in an interview at: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/clive-james-on-turning-his-last-time-on-earth-in... .
I'll give her a try, after reading awiebe's review below, from January 2008!

My feelings are bit skewed, I think, since i read the first half of the book a few weeks ago, and just finished the second half. 'In the Waiting Room' is great, no doubt about it, and Crusoe in England too. The rest of the book? Meh. I suspect that all the deep interpretations of these poems are more about the reader than the poet, and to be honest, whatever it is that I go to poetry for, Bishop doesn't give it to me. The poems are very pretty, no doubt, and have intellectual heft. I'm not sure what they lack- maybe an appropriate level of (British style) irony? Maybe my problem is rather what's in them: descriptions of art-works, descriptions of mildly surrealistic landscapes (or maybe 'landscapes'). I read a review which praised Bishop's 'sense of place,' and that might sum it up. Lacking much of a sense of place myself, I can't recognize it in others. So it's all my fault that I'm not into Bishop, but I think I can live with it.

About half of these were really good; about half were eye-rolling. Honestly, you can only use the word 'marl' so many times before it becomes precious. I think it might be once, too. Basically, when something actually happens and she feels free to comment on that happening, the poems are great; when nothing happens and she's just describing it's sleep inducing. For me anyway; I'm pretty uninterested in poetic descriptions of nature. I guess people fall madly in love with her travel poems, so maybe I should have started there, but I suspect that they'll be yet heavier on the description.