Geography III

by Elizabeth Bishop

Geography III, Bishop's final book of poems, first appeared in 1976. It contains such masterpieces as "In the Waiting Room," "The Moose," and "One Art."

Genres: Poetry, Classics, American, College, School, 20th Century, Female Authors

50 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and writer from Worcester, Massachusetts. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956. and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. She is considered one of the most important and distinguished American poets of the 20th century.

Reviews

[Paula Mota · Rating 3 out of 5]

O FIM DE MARÇO

(…)
Queria ir tão longe como a minha proto-casa-de-sonho,
a minha cripto-casa-de-sonho, aquela caixa torta
implantada sobre estacas, de ripas verdes,
uma espécie de casa-alcachofra, mas mais verde
(…)
Gostaria de me reformar ali e nada fazer,
ou não muito, para sempre, em dois quartos vazios:
espreitar pelos binóculos, ler livros aborrecidos,
velhos, longos, longos livros, e escrever notas inúteis,
falar para mim própria, e, nos dias de nevoeiro,
observar as gotículas caindo, carregadas de luz.
(…)

[Douglas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second read. I haven’t the faintest recollection of writing the below review in 2014. 🤷‍♂️

Geography III won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 1976. Several poems in this collection have been widely anthologized, and rightly so.

In her most famous poem, “In the Waiting Room”, Bishop remembers when she was a young child waiting for her aunt to finish a dental appointment. She starts looking through a National Geographic magazine and sees the striking images of life on earth – the inside of a volcano, an American adventure couple donned in riding boots and helmets, the dead body of (presumably) a cannibalized man, babies with pointed heads, and the image of women wearing neck rings. What makes this poem universal and so interesting is the existential breakdown that triggers a sort of panic attack:

Suddenly, from inside,
Came an oh! of pain!
-Aunt Consuelo’s voice-
not very loud or long.
I wasn’t at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn’t. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.

She goes on to wonder how she is connected to these almost otherworldly lives and volatile images:

I said to myself: three days
And you’ll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.

It’s impressive that Bishop was this astute at such a young age, but even more impressive that she carried this sensibility and detailed memory with her for so long. Bishop dies just a few short years after this collection was published.

Another poem, “ The Moose”, also stood out. Bishop describes the serene landscape of Massachusetts through a journey on a packed bus. The imagery is severe, yet also sublime:

Moonlight as we enter
the New Brunswick woods,
hairy, scratchy, splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb’s wool
on bushes in a pasture.

As if to suggest the power of chance on life, a large moose stops the bus in its tracks. The bus doesn’t hit the moose, but its large presence is enough to stop the bus and end all conversations, some meaningful, some mundane. The moose commands all of their attention, and for a brief moment, life and all its meaning is held hostage.

I read up a little on Bishop and learned that most of her poems were published exclusively in The New Yorker. There was an article in The NYTimes in 2011 that illustrated her love/hate relationship with the magazine. Apparently, she did not like being edited or slighted.

“She was neurotic about where her work appeared in the magazine. When one poem, “Night City,” ran in 1972 way back on Page 122, behind poems by Anne Sexton and John Updike, she threatened to “start sending work to other magazines.” She hated the way the magazine sometimes held her poems for as long as a year before printing them. “Naturally I’d like to see the few poems I do send out published — well, while I’m still alive.”

“Night City” was by far my favorite poem in this collection. I can see why she insisted its predominance.

Night City

No foot could endure it,
shoes are too thin.
Broken glass, broken bottles,
heaps of them burn.

Over those fires
no one could walk:
those flaring acids
and variegated bloods.

The city burns tears.
A gathered lake
of aquamarine
beings to smoke.

The city burns guilt.
-For guilt-disposal
the central heat
must be this intense

Diaphanous lymph,
bright turgid blood,
spatter outward
in clots of gold

to where run, molten,
in the dark environs
green and luminous
silicate rivers.

A pool of bitumen
one tycoon
wept by himself,
a blackened moon.

Another cried
a skyscraper up.
Look! Incandescent,
its wires drip.

The conflagration
fights for air
in a dead vacuum.
The sky is dead.

(Still, there are creatures,
careful ones, overhead.
They set down their feet, they walk
green, red; green, red.)

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

"UMA ARTE

A arte de perder não é difícil de se dominar;
tantas coisas parecem cheias de intenção
de se perderem que a sua perda não é uma calamidade.

Perder qualquer coisa todos os dias. Aceitar a agitação
de chaves perdidas, a hora mal passada.
A arte de perder não é difícil de se dominar.

Então procura perder mais, perder mais depressa:
lugares e nomes e para onde se tencionava
viajar. Nenhuma destas coisas trará uma calamidade.

Perdi o relógio da minha mãe. E olha! a última, ou
penúltima, de três casas amadas desapareceu.
A arte de perder não é difícil de se dominar.

Perdi duas cidades encantadoras: E, mais vastos ainda,
reinos que possuía, dois rios, um continente.
Sinto a falta deles, mas não foi uma calamidade.

— Mesmo o perder-te (A voz trocista, um gesto
que amo) não foi diferente disso. É evidente
que a arte de perder não é muito difícil de se dominar
mesmo que nos pareça (toma nota!) uma calamidade."

[Matthieu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worcester dentists: wait for your aunt Consuelo, sit and wait for her, there is snow outside, it was winter, it got dark early, the waiting room was full of grown-up people, there is snow covering your blankets, arctics and overcoats in your dreams, lamps and magazines; she was inside for such a long time, you are concerned, distracted, the world is spread out, materially spread out, entirely accessible to your hands; you read National Geographic, you can read, you study the photographs: the interior of a volcano, black, and ash-full, take a step and fall off the world; it was spilling over in rivulets of fire; a dead man slung on a pole haunts you, love is unreal, the present captions; suddenly, from the inside, a cry of pain—it's your aunt's voice; this cry is neither loud nor long; you weren't at all surprised; even then you knew that she was a foolish, timid woman; you should have been embarrassed, but you weren't; in three days, you'll be seven years old; say this to yourself to keep from falling off into cold, blue-black space, the void; you feel it: you are an I, you are an Elizabeth, you are one of them; the waiting room was bright and too hot; it was sliding beneath a great black wave, another and another; the magazine means little now—the present snaps suddenly into focus, in Worcester, Massachusetts, where it is winter, on a cold night only half-real, and yet, you are still waiting; it is still the fifth of February, 1918.

[Pete · Rating 5 out of 5]

the moose/bus ride one
the crusoe in england one
the one art one

human geography perfected through sidelong glances. i dunno just one of those books that walked up and did the "got your nose" thing at exactly the right time. this book has my nose.

[Nadine in NY Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read Bishop's poems in anthologies, but I've never read a collection of hers. This was a short one! (But I prefer dipping my toes in these shorter collections than picking up a tome of their life's work.) Her poems are quiet and quotidian and sometimes a little disturbing - often there is a sense of deep sorrow hovering just on the edges - and then ultimately quite soothing. They are filled with everyday details that we do not consciously notice as we go about our lives; these details combine to transport the reader into the scene.


Probably most readers are familiar with One Art ("The art of losing isn’t hard to master ..."), which is included in this collection. I found The End of March to be the most emotionally moving poem in the book.

The End Of March

For John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read: Duxbury

It was cold and windy, scarcely the day
to take a walk on that long beach
Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,
indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken,
seabirds in ones or twos.
The rackety, icy, offshore wind
numbed our faces on one side;
disrupted the formation
of a lone flight of Canada geese;
and blew back the low, inaudible rollers
in upright, steely mist.

The sky was darker than the water
—it was the color of mutton-fat jade.
Along the wet sand, in rubber boots, we followed
a track of big dog-prints (so big
they were more like lion-prints). Then we came on
lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string,
looping up to the tide-line, down to the water,
over and over. Finally, they did end:
a thick white snarl, man-size, awash,
rising on every wave, a sodden ghost,
falling back, sodden, giving up the ghost...
A kite string? —But no kite.

I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house,
my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box
set up on pilings, shingled green,
a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener
(boiled with bicarbonate of soda?),
protected from spring tides by a palisade
of--are they railroad ties?
(Many things about this place are dubious.)
I'd like to retire there and do nothing,
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:
look through binoculars, read boring books,
old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,
talk to myself, and, foggy days,
watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.
At night, a grog a l'américaine.
I'd blaze it with a kitchen match
and lovely diaphanous blue flame
would waver, doubled in the window.
There must be a stove; there is a chimney,
askew, but braced with wires,
and electricity, possibly
—at least, at the back another wire
limply leashes the whole affair
to something off behind the dunes.
A light to read by —perfect! But —impossible.
And that day the wind was much too cold
even to get that far,
and of course the house was boarded up.

On the way back our faces froze on the other side.
The sun came out for just a minute.
For just a minute, set in their bezels of sand,
the drab, damp, scattered stones
were multi-colored,
and all those high enough threw out long shadows,
individual shadows, then pulled them in again.
They could have been teasing the lion sun,
except that now he was behind them
—a sun who'd walked the beach the last low tide,
making those big, majestic paw-prints,
who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.

[Justin Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

My feelings are bit skewed, I think, since i read the first half of the book a few weeks ago, and just finished the second half. 'In the Waiting Room' is great, no doubt about it, and Crusoe in England too. The rest of the book? Meh. I suspect that all the deep interpretations of these poems are more about the reader than the poet, and to be honest, whatever it is that I go to poetry for, Bishop doesn't give it to me. The poems are very pretty, no doubt, and have intellectual heft. I'm not sure what they lack- maybe an appropriate level of (British style) irony? Maybe my problem is rather what's in them: descriptions of art-works, descriptions of mildly surrealistic landscapes (or maybe 'landscapes'). I read a review which praised Bishop's 'sense of place,' and that might sum it up. Lacking much of a sense of place myself, I can't recognize it in others. So it's all my fault that I'm not into Bishop, but I think I can live with it.

[Hallie Lauinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

my mind is blown, a poet unlike one i have ever read. reading bishop is like deciphering code. she writes with the utmost precision. her creative process and persistence amazes me. the more you explore / there can be no answers / things only keep turning in on themselves / new tensions / new visions / how she produces epistemological conundrums … i long to write a poetry as personal and yet evasive - she (mostly) tells how she feels without exposing herself . wow

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars rounded up because I loved how incredibly vivid her descriptions were. The Moose was definitely the best :)

[John Pistelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like so many poets, Bishop is someone I know only through anthology pieces, so I thought a whole collection would be in order. And Geography III, short as it is—50 pages of large print and enormous margins—demands to be read as a collection.

In my review of DeLillo's Libra, I noted the 20th-century tendency among novelists and poets to "[warn] against the dream of absolute knowledge"—Bishop contributes masterfully to this tradition, every element of this, her final book, participating in it.

The title and cover/frontispiece illustration evoke a textbook; and the first epigraph quotes from one, "First Lessons in Geography" in Monteith's Geographical Series of 1884 (the period of high imperialism), a set of questions and answers in which one imagines children being drilled in an exercise in rote education. One exchange is the following:

What are the directions on a map?
Toward the top, North; toward the bottom, South; to the right, East; to the left, West.

The collections second epigraph, authored seemingly by Bishop herself, mocks the textbook's assurance that geography has representational authority:

In what direction is the Volcano? The Cape? The Bay? The Lake? The Strait? The Mountains? The Isthmus?
What is in the East? In the West? In the South? In the North?
In the Northwest? In the Southeast? In the Northeast? In the Southwest?

As the questions proliferate, the absent answers will require more and more detail, until the representation—the map—becomes as complex and chaotic as the territory itself. Therefore, geography, the writing of the earth, is a construct that is at least semi-arbitrary; and since the arbitrary involves choice, human volition, it belongs to the realm of art as well as science—especially since art is needed from time to time to remind science that its maps are not the territory, that its questions, especially as they bear on culture and society, could be answered otherwise. This is a lesson for the advanced student of geography, however: hence our collection's title advertising the third course of study in the subject.

The volume's famous first poem, "In the Waiting Room," continues this theme with its depiction of the poet's formation of identity through an encounter with a representation (in National Geographic) of other people in other places, the poem's child character overwhelmed by physical and cultural difference until she feels washed over by black waves, which we may associate with the blackness of the naked women she encounters in the magazine. But the poem is not complacently racist; rather it dramatizes the formation of cultural identity, observes its contingency—

Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities—
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts—
held us all together
or made us all just one?

—and warns of its potentially violent consequences—

The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

The poem that best expresses Geography III's values is a translation (from a Spanish original by Octavio Paz) of an ode to Joseph Cornell, whose celebrated boxes contain various found objects. Note the nested transpositions, generic and geographical: American cultural detritus becomes American visual art object becomes Mexican poem in Spanish becomes American poem in English. And what Paz praises in Cornell's art also characterizes Bishop's:

Minimal, incoherent fragments
the opposite of History, creator of ruins,
out of your ruins you have made creations.

Theater of the spirits:
objects putting the laws
of identity through hoops.

Geography as the opposite of history: suspending teleological narrative to question identity via art.

And these poems, printed in large letters amid such an expanse of white space, call attention to their own Cornell-box qualities: they are small containers for overlooked fragments of world experience. The huge margins have a way of emphasizing the narrow poems; they instruct us to pay very close attention to Bishop's language.

All the poems in this collection are superb, and many are very well-known, like the villanelle "One Art" that begins with the unforgettable tragicomic litotes, "The art of losing isn't hard to master." The ekphrastic "Poem" turns both painting and memory into, well, a poem, and "The Moose" dramatizes an encounter with otherness that exceeds the cultural and extends to the natural; its counterpart, "Night City," turns the cultural as mediated by technology (the speaker views the city from an airplane) into an enchanting hellscape that suggests natural history, animal and mineral:

Diaphanous lymph,
bright turgid blood,
spatter outward
in clots of gold

to where run, molten,
in the dark environs
green and luminous
silicate rivers.

My favorite is perhaps "Crusoe in England," a long bravura piece in which the speaker, Robinson Crusoe, attempts to set the record straight by recalling the hallucinatory quality of his island sojourn, its hissing turtles, his dreams of "islands spawning islands," his real relationship with Friday (kindly—"Friday was nice"—and even queer—"he had a pretty body"), until he finds himself back in England:

Now I live here, another island,
that doesn't seem like one, but who decides?

Authority makes geography; poetry may make it otherwise.

And my other favorite is the witty "12 O'Clock News," in which the poet's desk is redescribed as a rebellious and strange country that the evening news reports upon—I imagine that the Vietnam War is an important part of this poem's background. The poet, in other words, belongs with those that conventional geography, the geography of 1884, the geography of National Geographic, finds unintelligble and threatening, construes as a target.

[Anna Barker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Helped me with a tossup at ACF Winter, so that's a win in my book

[Udai · Rating 3 out of 5]

well I have mixed feelings about this, I really liked "One Art" and read it and re-read it over and over again but the other poems didn't really touch me. But still,"One Art" is one of the best poems I've ever read.

[Haines Eason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bishop here masters the beguiling nature of time near and time far, and she does so on the wings of epiphanies past and in medias res. A humorous and yet deeply sad book where we somehow can feel our way past her usual armor. More than a classic.

[Pamela · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the touchstone.

[Wayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

SECOND REVIEW and REREAD - 2014

Have just added two new shelves to this poetry gem - Memoirs-biography and Movie-Seen-As-Well. "Reaching For The Moon", the film of Elizabeth Bishop's meeting with the architect Lota de Macedo in Brazil just released here in Sydney last week.
And that makes for a Capital Reason to reread this Favourite;
and hopefully lead onto her Collected Works for at least SOME dipping !

FIRST REVIEW and REREAD - 2008.

A little unexpected gem sent to me in 1983 for Xmas by my super-poetic Canadian mate Norma, God bless her, and which has always remained a favourite.It contains "One Art" which I have always regretted not having written myself and so grateful that Elizabeth did it so much better than I ever could have managed!!!
It begins:
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Now why would I spoil it by completing this tale of Losses Profound, all done with a shrug and the lightest of touches.
Yet the very last line shows she is heroic!!!!

I went out and bought the complete works after this.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who knows why, but I decided to do one of those Goodreads challenges, and picked 37 (20 + 17) for my total. So now Goodreads is worried that I am falling behind schedule, and I thought 'Hey, it's poetry month, I'll read a slim volume of verse or two, and GR's algorithm will be reassured.' The library is right across the street, and I figured they'd have a poetry month display, and they did not disappoint. So that's how I came to read this book at this moment. And now I can join in the general chorus of admiration for this poet. Wonderful on first reading, I am sure this book will reward many future re-readings. And I'll want to read more of Bishop's poetry as well. But very glad to have started with this one. Happy Poetry Month!

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a long time to warm up to Elizabeth Bishop, mainly because her style of poetry is so emphatically not-warm and impersonal and seemingly dispassionate. Over the years, I've come to appreciate that there *is* a kind of cold, slow, subtle beauty inherent in the very meticulousness of her descriptions. And I do wish I had her profound sense of place. Still, I wonder if I'll always prefer poets who pack a stronger emotional punch.....poets whose poems burn and rage like wildfires.....poets who speak to the impatient passionate teenager inside of me as well as to the seasoned grown-up.

[Michael Forsyth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two or three truly amazing poems here. Bishop profligately wields language like a master here, sliding into rhyme and rhythm almost as an afterthought.

This only gets three stars though because there's a couple of poems in here that seem amateur at best - most of all the poem of the items on her desk talking about what they do in thinly veiled metaphors. Additionally, there's a level of disjointedness to her poems, an incompleteness to the images that feel 'almost there' but not quite.

But it can't be less than three again because of two or three fantastic poems here, her clear command of language, and man. That joyful Moose.

[Carl Denton · Rating 5 out of 5]

it's just perfect and so is she that's all

[Illiterate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bishop sees the world is in flux so representations of it are unstable. She is playful and witty, but ultimately sad at the loss of places, simplicities, lovers.

[isabella · Rating 4 out of 5]

the poems poemed but did they poem-poemed? not sure, but they did poem

[Jonah Marcus · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this was a little genius but I need to read it again to be sure.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This may be a short collection, containing only ten poems, but what a marvelous imagination! The ten poems are "In the Waiting Room", "Crusoe in England", "Night City", "The Moose", "12 O'Clock News", "Poem", "One Art", "The End of March", "Objects & Apparitions", and "Five Flights Up". The poems may be few, but their subjects are many. Indeed, the poet's imagination is vast in scope, and yet controlled in its actualization. The poet writes about personal islands (in "Crusoe in England") and dream-houses (in "The End of March"). She writes about cages for infinity, and shadowless ladies playing hide-and-seek, and other incoherent fragments (in "Objects & Apparitions")...

The sun set in the sea; the same odd sun
rose from the sea,
and there was one of it and one of me.
The island had one kind of everything:
one tree snail, a bright violet-blue
with a thin shell, crept over everything,
over the one variety of tree,
a sooty, scrub affair.
Snail shells lay under these drifts
and, at a distance,
you'd swear that they were beds of irises.
- Crusoe in England (pg. 12)

I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house,
my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box
set up on pilings, shingled green,
a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener
(boiled with bicarbonate of soda?),
protected from spring tides by a palisade
of - are they railroad ties?
(Many things about this place are dubious.)
I'd like to retire there and do nothing,
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:
look through binoculars, read boring books,
old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,
talk to myself, and, foggy days,
watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.
- The End of March (pg. 43)

Minimal, incoherent apparitions:
the opposite of History, creator of ruins,
out of your ruins you have made creation.
- Objects & Apparitions (pg. 48)


In fact, this last poem (Objects & Apparitions) is the poet's translation of a poem by Octavio Paz. Curiously enough, the poem is the only translation in the collection. The reader is informed of this fact by a footnote at the end of the poem (Translated from the Spanish of Octavio Paz). Is it the poet's intention to deceive the reader? Perhaps she wants to take credit for Paz's poem. Or perhaps she is aligning herself with Paz, recognizing a kindred spirit and desiring to expose him to a wider audience (her audience).

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main...
- John Donne, "Meditation XVII. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions"

Bishop's poem, "Crusoe in England", about her personal island, may seem to emerge from the poem by Donne, but the poem is limited by this analytically approach, and the poet's imagination is underestimated. Read figuratively, Bishop's island stands for the individual. Of course it's not a literal island, adhering as it does to the poet's idiosyncrasies. This is affirmed by the conclusion, in which the poet is uprooted from her island and made to live in a drab city. Indeed, she opposes Donne's poem and Donne's continental digression...

Now I live here, another island,
that doesn't seem like one, but who decides?
My blood was full of them; my brain
bred islands. But that archipelago
has petered out. I'm old.
I'm bored, too, drinking, my real tea,
surrounded by uninteresting lumber.
- Crusoe in England (pg. 17)

This is affirmed, too, by the following poem "Night City", in which the poet describes another drab city in what feels like the continuation of "Crusoe in England"...

Another cried
a skyscraper up.
Look! Incandescent,
its wire drip.

The conflagration
fights for air
in a dread vacuum.
The sky is dead.
- Night City (pg. 20-21)


What's remarkable about the first three poems in the collection - "In the Waiting Room", "Crusoe in England", and "Night City" - is the continuity they seem to follow. "In the Waiting Room" with its trip to the dentist which leads to reading about volcanoes in National Geographic. "Crusoe in England" with its volcanoes that Bishop's island, from which she is uprooted and made to live in the drab city of "Night City" (above)...

My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes...
- In the Waiting Room (pg. 3)

A new volcano has erupted,
the paper says, and last week I was reading
where some ship saw an island being born...
- Crusoe in England (pg. 9)


What's more remarkable about the first poem, "In the Waiting Room" (about a youthful excursion to the dentist), is the poet's ability to create a scene, a seemingly mundane scene taking place in a dentist's office, and elevate it from the mundane to the fantastical. The poem is a perfect introduction to the collection, and a perfect demonstration of the power of Bishop's imagination...

LESSON VI
What is Geography?
A description of the earth's surface.
What is the Earth?
The planet or body on which we live.
What is the shape of the Earth?
Round, like a ball.
Of what is the Earth's surface composed?
Land and water.
- from "First Lessons in Geography," Monteith's Geographical Series, A. S. Barnes & Co., 1884 (quoted at the beginning of GEOGRAPHY III)

Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
- Aunt Consuelo's voice -
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
bu wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I - we - were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
- In the Waiting Room (pg. 5-6)


"12 O'Clock News" is a curious poem, each stanza divided into two columns: in one column, a household object (such as gooseneck lamp, typewriter, ink-bottle, ashtray); and in the other column, an unrelated description...

 In this small, backward country, one of the most
 backward left in the world today, communications
envelopes are crude and "industrialization" and its products
 almost nonexistent. Strange to say, however, sign-
 boards are on a truly gigantic scale.
 - 12 O'Clock News (pg. 33)

The collection ends "Yesterday brought today so lightly! / (A yesterday I find almost impossible to life.)" (pg. 50) In a way, the poet brings the collection full circle. The first poem being a reflection. Indeed, the poet reflects on "yesterday" in the first poem, "In the Waiting Room". About a youthful excursion to the dentist. In this way, she lifts yesterday. This being the last collection published by the poet, and this the last poem of the collection, the question is, was this her last poem? Had yesterday become so difficult to lift that the poet abandoned the endeavor shortly before succumbing to her advanced age?

In any case, the poem stands as a monument. The last line in particular. Whether or not the poet knew that these would be the last lines of her last collection, whether or not she phrased them deliberately, they are appropriate last lines at the end of an impressive career.


My favourite passages...

I often gave way to self-pity.
"Do you deserve this? I suppose I must.
I wouldn't be here otherwise. Was there
a moment when I actually chose this?
I don't remember, but there could have been."
What's wrong with self-pity, anyway?
With my legs dangling down familiarly
over a crater's edge, I told myself
"Pity should begin at home." So the more
pity I felt, the more I felt at home.
- Crusoe in England (pg. 11-12)

"Yes . . ." that peculiar
affirmative. "Yes . . ."
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half-groan, half-acceptance,
that means "Life's like that.
We know it (also death)."
- The Moose (pg. 28)

The little black dog runs in his yard.
His owner's voice arises, stern,
"You ought to be ashamed!"
What has he done?
- Five Flights Up (pg. 49)

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?

from "In the Waiting Room"

Only nine poems make up Elizabeth Bishop's final collection Geography III--but each one is stunning. Bishop explores the geography of individuality, of identity, of artistic mapping. In the end, though, the poems are not about the discussion of themes or gender issues: They are for physical and mental wonder. Each one sings, each one enlightens. When I ask myself, "What exactly is poetry?" This, this is the collection I reach for to provide definitive answers.

I never knew him. We both knew this place,
apparently, this literal small backwater,
looked at it long enough to memorize it,
our years apart. How strange. And it's still loved,
or its memory is (it must have changed a lot).
Our visions coincided--"visions" is
too serious a word--our looks, two looks:
art "copying from life" and life itself,
life and the memory of it so compressed
they've turned into each other. Which is which?
Life and the memory of it cramped,
dim, on a piece of Bristol board,
dim, but how live, how touching in detail
--the little that we get for free,
the little of our earthly trust. Not much.

from "Poem"

[Erica Lin · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The sun set in the sea; the same odd sun
rose from the sea,
and there was one of it and one of me."

This was my first time reading Elizabeth Bishop, the 1956 Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry. This collection is short enough to be read in an hour or two, though I’ll be needing more time to formulate my thoughts about it.

I think what I’ll say for now is that Bishop somehow taps into the “twilight hours” of the day when the fields become bluish-gray - it’s time to go home, but you feel melancholic and out of place, and linger along that border where reality and unreality mingle. Her poems “Night City” and “The Moose” capture that experience well, I think. Her writing carries a desolate quality, conveying a feeling of otherness and displacement that is unspeakably part of our everyday lives - as when reading a magazine in the dentist waiting room, when flying out over a lit city, or when sitting alone by the seafront.

Other highlighted quotes:

”I said to myself: three days
and you’ll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.”

“I often gave way to self-pity.
‘Do I deserve this? I suppose I must.
I wouldn’t be here otherwise. Was there
a moment when I actually chose this?
I don’t remember, but there could have been.’l

“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;
the poems—well, I tried
reciting to my iris-beds,
‘They flash upon that inward eye,
which is the bliss…’ The bliss of what?”

“I’m old.
I’m bored, too, drinking my real tea,
surrounded by uninteresting lumber.
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?
I knew each nick and scratch by heart,
the bluish blade, the broken tip,
the lines of wood-grain on the handle …
Now it won’t look at me at all.
The living soul has dribbled away.
My eyes rest on it and pass on.”

“Goodbye to the elms,
to the farm, to the dog.
The bus starts. The light
grows richer; the fog,
shifting, salty, thin,
comes closing in.”

“Our visions coincided—‘visions’ is
too serious a word—our looks, two looks:
art ‘copying from life’ and life itself,
life and the memory of it so compressed
they’ve turned into each other. Which is which?”

“Life and the memory of it cramped,
dim, on a piece of Bristol board,
dim, but how live, how touching in detail
—the little that we get for free,
the little of our earthly trust.”

“I’d like to retire there and do nothing,
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:
look through binoculars, read boring books,
old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,
talk to myself, and, foggy days,
watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.
At night, a grog à l’américaine.”

[bella · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful little book of poetry. What it lacks in page count, Geography lll makes up for in intelligence, insight, and beauty. Bishop takes the everyday, mundane parts of our lives and looks at them in a way I never would have been able to. She makes these ordinary things into something significant and meaningful. In the end our lives are made up of many small, regular things. And Bishop asks us with Geography lll, "Why not take a little bit of a closer look at them?"

[Ryan Schwartz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve loved all of the poems that I read from Elizabeth Bishop in the past. “In the waiting room” in particular. Though this collection didn’t speak to me in the same way, I’d like to think that since I took the time to analyze and write papers on the other ones i’d read, If I were to have spent that same amount of time with these ones I’d appreciate them more too

[Landon Kuhlmann · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are one or two fine poems among these words. But I'm so sick of reading white poets talk about native people of other countries. Directly disparaging or not, they are used as poetic playthings for white, prize-winning poets. Nothing changes and the day turns like a page.

[michal k-c · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-read this this afternoon — a perfect collection of poems set at the limit of description, a place where representation and figuration lapse and the gap between language and Real (rather than the reality we can articulate on a page) becomes pronounced.

[Julie Sommer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of poems is beautiful, simple, and thought provoking. The way that Bishop connects ideas and poems takes a lot of thought to find, which makes this such a great read.