Elizabeth Bishop Has Slimmed Down

We spent yesterday morning in the cemetery. There is one very elaborate, small mausoleum built by a German scientist, 60, who came here two years ago and fell in love with a Cuban girl, 18. She died, of consumption, and he built an airplane for her out on a pier-- she had always wanted to fly and never had, so he planned to take her body for a flight, but the plane would never take off."

Bishop's Key West letters are rich and strange and full of detail, and it's too bad there aren't more of them here. For the Key Wester walking past her still-disheveled house on White St. looking at the sky and trees, they give the impression that you are seeing what she saw from where she saw it. Along with the drafts and fragments from Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box, they complete a picture of Bishop, whose impact, like any artist's, may be measured in the terms of just how it was that she was human. Not just her what she had to say, but how it was she came to say it.

I almost agree with the urge of some critics to dismiss Bishop's fragments. I find her a particularly welcome major writer because her life-long brevity makes her work appear tantalizingly comprehensible.  And yet she remains just out of reach, as poetry should be. This book, bringing together all the published poems and most of the unpublished, along with all the prose, some letters, a chronology and notes, fools me again into thinking I can figure Bishop out. It seems like all the clues are there. I just need to work a little harder. If it's thousand-page depth flies in the face of Bishop's reticence, at least it is easier to keep all of Elizabeth near.

In 1993, the Key West Literary Seminar devoted its entire event to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Recordings, including Octavio Paz's keynote address, have recently been discovered, and will be made available online in the near future.