52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
45. The complete poems.
Bishop is introduced early in Hirsch’s How to read a poem, and she wrote comparatively little over her career, so I picked up this omnibus which turned out not to be so complete— she published one more volume, Geography III, before her death in 1979.
It’s hard to focus on each interior collection as a collection in a retrospective like this; I’m sure Questions of travel would be richer given more attention on its own. The early poems seemed muddy to me, but later she breaks into a precise richness, observing and describing and, through this, somehow imbuing her subject with meaning not initially there. ‘Roosters,’ ‘The Fish,’ ‘View of the Capitol,’ ‘Squatter’s Children,’ ‘Filling Station,’ … I’m sure aficionados are all well versed in these, but they’re a pleasure to me. ‘Arrival at Santos’ plays with language on the page such that even I laughed out loud.
I guess Bishop gets more attention now, and some think she doesn’t quite earn it. I don’t know; I wouldn’t turn many of these poems down, and I bet her critics wouldn’t either.
