Volume 9, Number 6 · October 12, 1967
A Poet of Landscape
By Robert Mazzocco
Questions of Travel
by Elizabeth Bishop
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 95 pp., (paperback, $1.95) (paper)
'More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors,' says Elizabeth Bishop in the first poem of her first collection, North and South, published in 1946. The line seems emblematic of everything about her, then or now. Miss Bishop is the poet of land-scapes and seascapes and maps: most of her poems are panoramas set in 'relief,' swarming particulars full of distortion, enlargement, and 'true view.' In 'Florida,' she surveys 'the state with the prettiest name,' surfacing above it from one angle, swooping down from another. Reading it you might think she was an aerial topographer with a nine-lens aerial camera, catching the look of the 'green hummocks/like ancient cannon-balls sprouting grass,' eventually catching even the sound of the mosquitoes 'hunting to the tune of their ferocious obbligatos.' In her third collection, Questions of Travel, published last year, 'the beach hisses like fat.' Sound, sight, touch: Miss Bishop's poems are full of visual and tactile relationships, modifications and recombinations. Often her scenes become arenas, and she herself something like a circus master taking a bouncy interest in many things going on at once. She has a penchant for the puffed-up word: stupefaction, illumination, reflection—balloons she can let the air out of, or set adrift, 'artlessly rhetorical,' before they're pulled homeward to earth. 'White herons got up as angels,' flying 'in tiers and tiers of immaculate reflections.' but they're really part of a 'cartoon by Raphael for a tapestry for a Pope'—part of a half comic, half lyric conceit.
Review, 3160 words
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