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20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
a lot of great poems, May 12, 2000
By A Customer
Probably like a lot of people, I was led to Elizabeth Bishop by the dedication in Robert Lowell's great "Skunk Hour". I like many of the poems in this book. (I know next to nothing about poetry but, to give you an idea, my favorite poet is Yeats.) Bishop has a lot of thoughtful imagery, and she conceptualizes things in a fresh way. It often takes you aback. To take the very first poem here, "The Map," there're the lines: "The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still. / Labrador's yellow, where the moony Eskimo / has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays, / under a glass as if they were expected to blossom"The book is in roughly chronological format, and naturally the poems on the whole seem to get better, subtler, through the years (a few things later are a little strange). Armadillo, referred to by Lowell, reads a bit like a companion piece of Skunk Hour: "This is the time of year / when almost every night / the frail, illegal fire balloons appear. / Climbing the mountain height, / Rising toward a saint / still honored in these parts, . . ." I confess my favorite poem here would be "Crusoe in England", a revery: "I felt a deep affection for / the smallest of my island industries. / No, not exactly, since the smallest was / a miserable philosophy. / Because I didn't know enough. / Why didn't I know enough of something? / Greek drama or astronomy? The books / I'd read were full of blanks", and then, back in England, "The knife there on the shelf--/ it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix. / It lived. How many years did I / beg it, implore it, not to break? . . . / Now it won't look at me at all." One thing I'd mention is, there isn't much in the way of unifying currents through the poems. Yeats, I think, has his Irish legends and politics and a pretty characteristic moral tone. Frost, his woods. Sylvia Plath, her hell. Bishop however comes across as an incidental observer of things. Her poems (even with each of the original collections, except maybe one) vary widely in theme, place, audience, mood. Here's a homage to Robert Lowell, and next an oddly rhyming poem on Rio de Janeiro. One page it's "View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress," next it's "Insomnia" (one of poems here that I guess could be seen as having a sapphic aspect to it). It's as if Bishop were always visiting different places and people and taking in what she came across (in fact, she was often in foreign lands; the cover has a drawing by her in Mexico). I don't necessarily like this aspect of her poetry as a whole--it reminds me of why I'm not a big fan of Katherine Mansfield. But of course that's saying nothing about each poem. A poem by Manuel Bandeira which Bishop translated (included here) goes: "I would like my last poem thus . . . that it have the beauty of almost scentless flowers . . ." That's what a lot of these poems are like. These are said to be all of Bishop's known poems--she died in 1979--including stuff she wrote at 16 which, as this edition helpfully notes, "appeared in the Walnut Hill School magazine in 1927". It's a handsomely-done edition, with pleasant font and roomy margins. 275 pages.
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by Wallace Stevens
by Robert Lowell
by Marianne Moore
by Emily Dickinson
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