The
Complete Poems, 1927-1979 by
Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop was vehement about her art--a
perfectionist who didn't want to be seen as a "woman
poet." In 1977, two years before her death she wrote,
"art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical
compositions, etc., into two sexes is to emphasize values in them
that are not art." She also deeply distrusted the
dominant mode of modern poetry, one practiced with such detached
passion by her friend Robert Lowell, the confessional.
Bishop was unforgiving of fashion and limited
ways of seeing and feeling, but cast an even more trenchant eye on
her own work. One wishes this volume were thicker, though the
perfections within mark the rightness of her approach. The poems
are sublimely controlled, fraught with word play, fierce moral
vision (see her caustic ballad on Ezra Pound, "Visits to St.
Elizabeths"), and reticence. From the surreal sorrow of the
early "Man-Moth" (leaping off from a typo she had come
across for "mammoth"), about a lonely monster who rarely
emerges from "the pale subways of cement he calls his
home," to the beauty of her villanelle "One Art"
(with its repeated "the art of losing isn't hard to
master"), the poet wittily explores distance and desolation,
separation and sorrow.
Like all great poets, she was less a maker of
poems than a maker of feelings. -- David Bromwich, The New York
Times Book Review
The
Collected Prose by
Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Giroux (Editor)
Farrar, Straus and Giroux first published
Elizabeth Bishop's Collected Prose in 1984, five years
after the poet's death. It's now too late to ask whether this
deeply private woman would have allowed such an act, let alone
approved of the biographies and studies that have begun to appear.
It's not too late, however, to praise her editor's decision to
gather her fiction and nonfiction together. Without it we would
not have the dreamlike "The Sea & Its Shore" (in
which a man hired to rid the beach of trash tries to make sense of
each scrap of writing he comes upon) or memoirs such as
"Primer Class," which begins, "Every time I see
long columns of numbers, handwritten in a certain way, a strange
sensation or shudder, partly aesthetic, partly painful goes
through my diaphragm." Precise as ever, Bishop continues,
"It is like seeing the dorsal fin of a large fish suddenly
cut through the surface of the water." The collection's two
standouts are "Efforts of Affection," a memoir of her
mentor Marianne Moore, and the comic masterwork "The U.S.A.
School of Writing." The latter is a sly recollection of her
first job--at a deeply dodgy correspondence school. "Henry
James once said that he who would aspire to be a writer must
inscribe on his banner the one word 'Loneliness.' In the case of
my students, their need was not to ward off society, but to get
into it."
