Elizabeth Bishop, Poems
Chatto & Windus; $46.95; 352pp
‘If you want to read some of the poems your great-great-grandchildren will be reading,’ wrote Randall Jarrell in 1955, ‘these are the books for you to buy.’ I don’t think my great-great-grandparents ever read The Yale Review (in the East End of London in the mid twentieth century it was The Harvard Advocate or nothing at all), but had they done so they might well have scoffed at its poetry reviewer’s audacious prediction. Jarrell, however, was right on the money. The books he was referring to were by Robert Graves and Elizabeth Bishop – two names that must appear on any list of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. It is thus with a sense of reinvigorated pride in the predictive powers of book reviewers that I take up the centenary edition of the latter poet’s collected poems – a volume that, though not without its problems, is insured against catastrophe by dint of the illustrious name on its front cover.
Though Bishop’s reputation is not in doubt, it has been a little obscured over the years by the fact that her art ran slightly counter to the prevailing poetic mood of the time. Like many of the so-called confessional poets, Bishop had a difficult life. Her father died when she was eight months old and her mother was committed to a mental institution – events that left her effectively orphaned. Later she fell foul of depression herself and attempted to drown her demons with alcohol. But while there are hints of her harrowing life story sprinkled throughout poems such as ‘One Art’, Bishop disliked the indiscreetness of poets such as Robert Lowell, especially when it came to romantic relationships. (Her own romantic relationships were with other women, so she knew the value of privacy.) Instead of candour, Bishop chose reticence, and not just on moral or ethical grounds but because it suited her poetic gift. While the confessionals peered inward, Bishop gazed outward, and the results were rarely less than dazzling.
The best description of Bishop’s poetry is to be found in a letter from the poet herself, the subject of which isn’t poetry at all but the prose of a certain English naturalist. ‘[R]eading Darwin,’ Bishop writes, ‘one admires the beautiful and solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations … What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.’ That last phrase especially meets the case. Bishop’s poems have an ocular intensity; it is the very act of looking that excites her. Take these lines from ‘Cirque d’Hiver’, which describe a mechanical horse and dancer:
He feels her pink toes dangle toward his back
along the little pole
that pierces both her body and her soul
and goes though his, and reappears below,
under his belly, as a big tin key.
He canters three steps, then he makes a bow,
canters again, bows on one knee,
canters, then clicks and stops, and looks at me.
One can almost see the movement of the horse, such is the imitative power of these lines, with their repetitions and heavy caesuras. But this technical brilliance is its own reward. In the final stanza, the poet and the horse are ‘Facing each other rather desperately’. Neither, in the end, has anything to say except ‘Well, we have come this far.’
Given this fascination with seeing, it is little wonder that representation emerges as a theme in Bishop’s poetry. In ‘The Map’, the poet describes a map as if it were a work of art rather than a merely functional item: ‘These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger / like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.’ Sometimes the poems take themselves as a subject. The remarkable early poem ‘The Man-Moth’, inspired by a newspaper misprint for ‘mammoth’, is as much a study of imagination as it is a vision of loneliness. Bishop’s is a self-delighting art. Like ‘the imaginary iceberg’ in the poem of that name, her poems cut their ‘facets from within’. When the miracle of the loaves and fishes is re-imagined with coffee and buns the miracle is really the poem itself, its sestina form the perfect match to the brilliance of its soup line conceit.
Such miracles as occur in Bishop’s poems could best be described as epiphanies of seeing. In ‘The Armadillo’ the eponymous critter is suddenly glimpsed when an illegal fire balloon splatters ‘like an egg of fire / against the cliff behind the house’. Similarly, the titular star of ‘The Moose’ appears unexpectedly on the ‘moonlit macadam’, leaving the poet with a ‘sensation of joy’. Or here, in full, is Bishop’s ‘Sonnet’, one of the last poems, if not the last poem, she wrote before she died in 1979:
Caught – the bubble
in the spirit-level,
a creature divided;
and the compass needle
wobbling and wavering,
undecided.
Freed – the broken
thermometer’s mercury
running away;
and the rainbow-bird
from the narrow bevel
of the empty mirror,
flying wherever
it feels like, gay!
Great stuff! And only slightly marred by the fact that the publisher has decided to print it, and all the other poems in the book, a centimetre from the left-hand side of the page.
This new edition of Bishop’s poems contains everything the poet wanted to save. One important addition is the inclusion, in an appendix, of a number of unpublished manuscript poems, which are printed opposite facsimiles of the originals. Interesting though this material is, the editor has rather fudged the selection by including more-or-less finished poems alongside ones which are not only not finished but which Bishop herself had clearly rejected by the time-honoured means of drawing a line through the draft. No trust is being broken here: Bishop gave complete discretion to her editors. But I do think that greater sensitivity might have been exercised in the editor’s selection.
These, however, are merely quibbles. In the end, no dodgy pagination or editorial lapse of judgment can take away from the solid achievement of this most original and scrupulous of poets. Suffice it, then, to say: If you want to read some of the poems your great-great-grandchildren will be reading, this is the book for you to buy.
Chatto & Windus; $46.95; 352pp
‘If you want to read some of the poems your great-great-grandchildren will be reading,’ wrote Randall Jarrell in 1955, ‘these are the books for you to buy.’ I don’t think my great-great-grandparents ever read The Yale Review (in the East End of London in the mid twentieth century it was The Harvard Advocate or nothing at all), but had they done so they might well have scoffed at its poetry reviewer’s audacious prediction. Jarrell, however, was right on the money. The books he was referring to were by Robert Graves and Elizabeth Bishop – two names that must appear on any list of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. It is thus with a sense of reinvigorated pride in the predictive powers of book reviewers that I take up the centenary edition of the latter poet’s collected poems – a volume that, though not without its problems, is insured against catastrophe by dint of the illustrious name on its front cover.
Though Bishop’s reputation is not in doubt, it has been a little obscured over the years by the fact that her art ran slightly counter to the prevailing poetic mood of the time. Like many of the so-called confessional poets, Bishop had a difficult life. Her father died when she was eight months old and her mother was committed to a mental institution – events that left her effectively orphaned. Later she fell foul of depression herself and attempted to drown her demons with alcohol. But while there are hints of her harrowing life story sprinkled throughout poems such as ‘One Art’, Bishop disliked the indiscreetness of poets such as Robert Lowell, especially when it came to romantic relationships. (Her own romantic relationships were with other women, so she knew the value of privacy.) Instead of candour, Bishop chose reticence, and not just on moral or ethical grounds but because it suited her poetic gift. While the confessionals peered inward, Bishop gazed outward, and the results were rarely less than dazzling.
The best description of Bishop’s poetry is to be found in a letter from the poet herself, the subject of which isn’t poetry at all but the prose of a certain English naturalist. ‘[R]eading Darwin,’ Bishop writes, ‘one admires the beautiful and solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations … What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.’ That last phrase especially meets the case. Bishop’s poems have an ocular intensity; it is the very act of looking that excites her. Take these lines from ‘Cirque d’Hiver’, which describe a mechanical horse and dancer:
He feels her pink toes dangle toward his back
along the little pole
that pierces both her body and her soul
and goes though his, and reappears below,
under his belly, as a big tin key.
He canters three steps, then he makes a bow,
canters again, bows on one knee,
canters, then clicks and stops, and looks at me.
One can almost see the movement of the horse, such is the imitative power of these lines, with their repetitions and heavy caesuras. But this technical brilliance is its own reward. In the final stanza, the poet and the horse are ‘Facing each other rather desperately’. Neither, in the end, has anything to say except ‘Well, we have come this far.’
Given this fascination with seeing, it is little wonder that representation emerges as a theme in Bishop’s poetry. In ‘The Map’, the poet describes a map as if it were a work of art rather than a merely functional item: ‘These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger / like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.’ Sometimes the poems take themselves as a subject. The remarkable early poem ‘The Man-Moth’, inspired by a newspaper misprint for ‘mammoth’, is as much a study of imagination as it is a vision of loneliness. Bishop’s is a self-delighting art. Like ‘the imaginary iceberg’ in the poem of that name, her poems cut their ‘facets from within’. When the miracle of the loaves and fishes is re-imagined with coffee and buns the miracle is really the poem itself, its sestina form the perfect match to the brilliance of its soup line conceit.
Such miracles as occur in Bishop’s poems could best be described as epiphanies of seeing. In ‘The Armadillo’ the eponymous critter is suddenly glimpsed when an illegal fire balloon splatters ‘like an egg of fire / against the cliff behind the house’. Similarly, the titular star of ‘The Moose’ appears unexpectedly on the ‘moonlit macadam’, leaving the poet with a ‘sensation of joy’. Or here, in full, is Bishop’s ‘Sonnet’, one of the last poems, if not the last poem, she wrote before she died in 1979:
Caught – the bubble
in the spirit-level,
a creature divided;
and the compass needle
wobbling and wavering,
undecided.
Freed – the broken
thermometer’s mercury
running away;
and the rainbow-bird
from the narrow bevel
of the empty mirror,
flying wherever
it feels like, gay!
Great stuff! And only slightly marred by the fact that the publisher has decided to print it, and all the other poems in the book, a centimetre from the left-hand side of the page.
This new edition of Bishop’s poems contains everything the poet wanted to save. One important addition is the inclusion, in an appendix, of a number of unpublished manuscript poems, which are printed opposite facsimiles of the originals. Interesting though this material is, the editor has rather fudged the selection by including more-or-less finished poems alongside ones which are not only not finished but which Bishop herself had clearly rejected by the time-honoured means of drawing a line through the draft. No trust is being broken here: Bishop gave complete discretion to her editors. But I do think that greater sensitivity might have been exercised in the editor’s selection.
These, however, are merely quibbles. In the end, no dodgy pagination or editorial lapse of judgment can take away from the solid achievement of this most original and scrupulous of poets. Suffice it, then, to say: If you want to read some of the poems your great-great-grandchildren will be reading, this is the book for you to buy.
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