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Questions of Travel
The publication of this book is a literary event. It is Miss Bishop's first volume of verse since Poems, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955. This new collection consists of two parts. Under the general heading "Brazil" are grouped eleven poems including "Manuelzinho," "The Armadillo," "Twelfth Morning, or What You Will," "The Riverman," "Brazil, January 1, 1502" and the title poem. The second section, entitled "Elsewhere," includes others "First Death in Nova Scotia," "Manners," "Sandpiper," "From Trollope's Journal," and "Visits to St. Elizabeths." In addition to the poems there is an extraordinary story of a Nova Scotia childhood, "In the Village." Robert Lowell has recently written, "I am sure no living poet is as curious and observant as Miss Bishop. What cuts so deep is that each poem is inspired by her own tone, a tone of large, grave tenderness and sorrowing amusement. She is too sure of herself for empty mastery and breezy plagiarism, too interested for confession and musical monotony, too powerful for mismanaged fire, and too civilized for idiosyncratic incoherence. She has a humorous, commanding genius for picking up the unnoticed, now making something sprightly and right, and now a great monument. Once her poems, each shining, were too few. Now they are many. When we read her, we enter the classical serenity of a new country."
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First published June 1, 1965
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About the author
Elizabeth Bishop
144 books591 followersLibrarian 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.
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.
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June 7, 2021
Dois mundos compõem Questões de viagem. O primeiro, onde Elizabeth encontrou um amor de longa duração assim como certa estabilidade, foi nos braços de sua Lota (de Macedo Soares).
Os poemas da primeira parte, Brasil, Brasil, iniciam-se com sua chegada ao porto de Santos e traduzem vivências, experiências e até mesmo uma notícia de jornal, a morte do bandido do Morro da Babilônia. São poemas ritmados, cadenciados, por vezes parecem uma dança da terra com riquezas próprias.
Já na segunda parte, Outros lugares, somos remetidos às reinvenções das memórias da poeta em sua infância vivida na Nova Escócia (Canadá). Apesar do impacto da doença mental da mãe, que as obrigam a saírem de Boston e irem viver com a família na Nova Escócia, a menina que um dia seria poeta procura trazer a realidade dura para a sua vivência lúdica.
O livro é uma edição bilíngue, com tradução de Paulo Henriques Britto. Apesar da maestria do tradutor, preferi ler quase que somente os poemas em Inglês, por causa do ritmo próprio da poeta. Até porque a tradução de poemas muitas vezes resulta em versões e não exatamente em traduções, perdendo-se por vezes o sentido único do poema.
Os poemas da primeira parte, Brasil, Brasil, iniciam-se com sua chegada ao porto de Santos e traduzem vivências, experiências e até mesmo uma notícia de jornal, a morte do bandido do Morro da Babilônia. São poemas ritmados, cadenciados, por vezes parecem uma dança da terra com riquezas próprias.
Já na segunda parte, Outros lugares, somos remetidos às reinvenções das memórias da poeta em sua infância vivida na Nova Escócia (Canadá). Apesar do impacto da doença mental da mãe, que as obrigam a saírem de Boston e irem viver com a família na Nova Escócia, a menina que um dia seria poeta procura trazer a realidade dura para a sua vivência lúdica.
O livro é uma edição bilíngue, com tradução de Paulo Henriques Britto. Apesar da maestria do tradutor, preferi ler quase que somente os poemas em Inglês, por causa do ritmo próprio da poeta. Até porque a tradução de poemas muitas vezes resulta em versões e não exatamente em traduções, perdendo-se por vezes o sentido único do poema.
August 20, 2018
I came across a reference to “Sandpiper” in Silas House’s Southernmost, so started there and then proceeded through the rest of the collection in a random order. Over half of the poems are set in Brazil, and the rest “Elsewhere.” I liked particular lines or images but the whole doesn’t particularly hang together, and sometimes the repetition is too much, as in “Sestina” or “Visits to St. Elizabeths.” [Read from the Complete Poems.]
Favorite lines:
“Like a first coat of whitewash when it’s wet, / the thin gray mist lets everything show through” (from “Twelfth Morning; or What You Will”)
“Somebody embroidered the doily. / Somebody waters the plant, / … Somebody loves us all.” (from “Filling Station”)
Favorite lines:
“Like a first coat of whitewash when it’s wet, / the thin gray mist lets everything show through” (from “Twelfth Morning; or What You Will”)
“Somebody embroidered the doily. / Somebody waters the plant, / … Somebody loves us all.” (from “Filling Station”)
April 15, 2019
Elizabeth Bishop went to Brazil in 1951 and stayed for 15 years, living with her lover, Lota de Macedo Soares. The first half of this 1965 volume of poetry, her third, variously documents this extended sojourn: titled "Brazil," it includes not only lyrics that record her impressions of the country, such as "Squatters' Children" or "Song for the Rainy Season," but also excursions into literary forms inspired by it, like the fable "The Riverman" and the ballad "The Burglar of Babylon."
As the volume's title tells us, travel provokes uncertainties, as it both expands and emphasizes the limits of the self and the localities that formed it. Bishop's queries begin with this volume's first piece, "Arrival at Santos," wherein our itinerant poet comes to Brazil for the first time and reflects on the ethics of her motive:
As if foretelling the Goodreads reviewers who will in the second decade of the 21st century chastise her for her white woman's imperial arrogance, she mocks her own absent-minded surprise that things there are not altogether different from things here, even if "here" is only the set of often ignorant expectations one carries everywhere:
For the title poem, our subjectivity so gets in the way of encountering anything outside itself that we might as well not even move ourselves in space at all, since we will only find our desires projected onto an impenetrable mask of otherness, which we have no right anyway to penetrate:
On the one hand, the poem's epistemological questions are exemplary enough that they might lead off some anthology's selection of "postmodern poetry." On the other hand, Emerson, the presiding spirit of the American lyric, wrote in "Self-Reliance," "Traveling is a fool's paradise" because "[m]y giant goes with me wherever I go"—the "giant" being the self. The poem concludes, after a catalogue of all the Brazilian experiences it would have been a "pity" to miss ("Never to have studied history in / the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages"), when the "traveller" writes the following in her notebook:
Note the two characteristic postmodern gestures here: 1. the metafictional one of calling attention to the poet as writer and the poem as language when the lyric's thus-far stately inquiries finally show their provisional origin in notebook jottings; 2. and the political one of deconstructing the putatively natural or stable or organic concept of "home" given that we don't choose where we're from and that all places are equally imagined.
Bishop may have been an independently wealthy white woman, but she wasn't stupid. See also "Brazil, January 1, 1502," wherein Bishop explicitly likens her arrival in Brazil to that of the Portuguese colonizers:
Bishop's sympathy is perfectly if not voluntarily poised between the armored European men out to extract this utopia's resources (what else is Bishop there for if not to acquire something?) and the indigenous women who protectively disappear behind the mystifying curtain of extravagant nature and inscrutable culture (as the anti-confessional poet vanishes into the intricacy of her verse). Better this honest, unsentimental, and unapologetic self-appraisal than the behavior in fashion now: a lot of ineffectual hand-wringing about privilege by people who couldn't divest themselves of it if they wanted to (and they don't).
Bishop's self-awareness will not excuse for many contemporary readers the other poems in the "Brazil" section, the ones that today would be dismissed as appropriations: neither the jaunty, poignant ballad of "The Burglar of Babylon" nor the remarkable magic-realist fable, based on Amazonian lore, of "The Riverman":
And certainly not "Manuelzinho," a dramatic monologue spoken by a "friend of the writer." Bishop is here using "friend" the way my grandmother tended to use it, as a euphemism for a gay person's partner: the speaker is the rather aristocratic Lota de Macedo Soares, and the subject is her eponymous live-in servant with his maddening, quirky ways:
She resolves at the conclusion to love him and implicitly to treat him with more personal respect, though I reflect that even Tolstoy tried to improve material and educational conditions for the peasants of his estate, not just to change his own frame of mind:
While Bishop could be read as mocking the high-handed speaker as much as the object of this speaker's arrogant derision and even more arrogant sympathy—such a send-up is a customary use for the dramatic monologue—even this just reinforces the smug superiority of the poem's humor. It's not my favorite in the collection.
The second half of the volume, called "Elsewhere," leaves Bishop's Brazilian present for her past, largely in Nova Scotia, where she spent her childhood raised by her grandparents after her father's death and her mother's institutionalization. Like the poet's notebook writing that concludes "Questions of Travel," the end of the book roots its early abstractions and excursions in the poet's own contingent circumstances.
If Bishop had earlier written, "home, / wherever that may be," we begin to understand why when we read the volume's strangest piece, the autobiographical short story "In the Village." This prose narrative recounts a childhood idyll spent away from home: home is where her mother, losing her grip on sanity, screams—a scream that haunts the whole reminiscence and the whole of Bishop's childhood ("A scream...hangs there forever, a slight stain in those pure blue skies"). Her taste for travel, we realize, begins in this escape from disintegrating maternity, this forced expulsion from the nest, with her energetic errands all around the village.
These early travels bring her into contact with the warm physicality of animal life and with the many vital and inspiriting varieties of earthly labor in contrast to her mother's neuroticizing immurement in finery. I think particularly of Nate the blacksmith, the ring of whose hammer on metal Bishop plays in counterpoint to her mother's scream: the defense against madness's noise is the clear ring of craft and the mystery of art.
(A later corollary in the collection is "Sestina," another portrayal, this time in a most demanding poetic form, of the poet's surreally chaotic childhood: "Time to plant tears, says the almanac.")
"In the Village" is an ars poetica in prose. Yet as prose it calls on fictional as well as poetic tradition: it reminds me of the earlier stories in Dubliners that grew out of Joyce's epiphanic vignettes, or of Katherine Mansfield's great, montage-like autobiographical stories of a New Zealand childhood in "Prelude" or "At the Bay," or even, closer to home, Hawthorne's genial but shadowed sketches of New England village life.
To conclude, the unease in the whole volume, perhaps its chief question, comes from those imbalances of gender and class identification evoked again and again. The poet sympathizes now with Portuguese colonists, now with the village blacksmith, and yet she recoils too from a laboring masculinity that signifies at once salvifically conscientious craftsmanship and acquisitive global tyranny.
The critique of masculine imperialism is welcome, but, as with "Manuelzinho," when the female spectator looks down on her male social inferiors, we are reminded that a host of anticolonial and postcolonial thinkers linked feminist politics or female literature to imperialism, from James Joyce's observation that Daniel Defoe invented both feminism and imperialism in his two most famous protagonists, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, to Edward Said's censure of Jane Austen and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's rebuke to Charlotte Brontë and Jean Rhys.
Nowhere is Bishop's ambivalence more evident in Questions of Travel than in the charming and disgusting late piece "Filling Station." This poem expresses the speaker's campily exaggerated abhorrence at the filth of the titular locale and the males who work there and her appreciation of the silent female labor that maintains whatever aesthetic standards the dirty place manages to evince:
Real genius is always tasteless and troubling, and so with the last line. It brings the speaker's distanced-from-the-poet (because so overwrought) hauteur to a punchline climax. But it also makes a sincere feminist protest against the invisibility of female labor that subtends everyday life. In linking this creative labor to God (who "loves us all") it further portends female divinity and allies the poet, silent maker of the poem, to the cosmic Creator.
Yet its only half-ironic afflatus puts working men in their place; it is so like a certain strain of obtusely elite bourgeois feminism—I think of a celebrity feminist writer who notoriously berated a McDonald's employee for reinforcing the gender binary when he asked her if she wanted a boys' or a girls' Happy Meal—that I don't know whether to marvel or to throw the book at the wall.
I marvel. I'm no poetry expert, but of the so-far canonical midcentury American poets I've read (Lowell, Berryman, Ginsberg, Plath, etc.), Bishop has always struck me as the only unambiguous great. Like all the greats, she is, as the kids say, problematic. Moral and political rectitude is always an oversimplification of this incorrigible world, so it is only given to lesser lights.
Bishop knows it. Questions of Travel ends with "Visits to St. Elizabeth's," a nursery rhyme on the model of "The House that Jack Built" about Bishop's sojourns to see Ezra Pound in the mental hospital where he was held in lieu of being shot for treason. The poem's escalating and repeating motifs build to an astonishing thunder. Adjectives Bishop attaches to Pound, "the poet, the man," throughout: tragic, talkative, honored, old, brave, cranky, cruel, busy, tedious, wretched. While I have no sympathy for Pound's particular form of transgression (Bishop didn't either), I want that list on a T-shirt, or my tombstone.
As the volume's title tells us, travel provokes uncertainties, as it both expands and emphasizes the limits of the self and the localities that formed it. Bishop's queries begin with this volume's first piece, "Arrival at Santos," wherein our itinerant poet comes to Brazil for the first time and reflects on the ethics of her motive:
Oh, tourist,
is this how this country is going to answer you
and your immodest demands for a different world,
and a better life, and complete comprehension
of both at last, and immediately,
after eighteen days of suspension?
As if foretelling the Goodreads reviewers who will in the second decade of the 21st century chastise her for her white woman's imperial arrogance, she mocks her own absent-minded surprise that things there are not altogether different from things here, even if "here" is only the set of often ignorant expectations one carries everywhere:
So that's the flag. I never saw it before.
I somehow never thought of there being a flag,
but of course there was, all along. And coins, I presume,
and paper money; they remain to be seen.
For the title poem, our subjectivity so gets in the way of encountering anything outside itself that we might as well not even move ourselves in space at all, since we will only find our desires projected onto an impenetrable mask of otherness, which we have no right anyway to penetrate:
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
On the one hand, the poem's epistemological questions are exemplary enough that they might lead off some anthology's selection of "postmodern poetry." On the other hand, Emerson, the presiding spirit of the American lyric, wrote in "Self-Reliance," "Traveling is a fool's paradise" because "[m]y giant goes with me wherever I go"—the "giant" being the self. The poem concludes, after a catalogue of all the Brazilian experiences it would have been a "pity" to miss ("Never to have studied history in / the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages"), when the "traveller" writes the following in her notebook:
"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?
Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there...No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"
Note the two characteristic postmodern gestures here: 1. the metafictional one of calling attention to the poet as writer and the poem as language when the lyric's thus-far stately inquiries finally show their provisional origin in notebook jottings; 2. and the political one of deconstructing the putatively natural or stable or organic concept of "home" given that we don't choose where we're from and that all places are equally imagined.
Bishop may have been an independently wealthy white woman, but she wasn't stupid. See also "Brazil, January 1, 1502," wherein Bishop explicitly likens her arrival in Brazil to that of the Portuguese colonizers:
Just so the Christians, hard as nails,
tiny as nails, and glinting,
in creaking armor, came and found it all,
not unfamiliar:
no lovers’ walks, no bowers,
no cherries to be picked, no lute music,
but corresponding, nevertheless,
to an old dream of wealth and luxury
already out of style when they left home—
wealth, plus a brand-new pleasure.
Directly after Mass, humming perhaps
L’ Homme armé or some such tune,
they ripped away into the hanging fabric,
each out to catch an Indian for himself—
those maddening little women who kept calling,
calling to each other (or had the birds waked up?)
and retreating, always retreating, behind it.
Bishop's sympathy is perfectly if not voluntarily poised between the armored European men out to extract this utopia's resources (what else is Bishop there for if not to acquire something?) and the indigenous women who protectively disappear behind the mystifying curtain of extravagant nature and inscrutable culture (as the anti-confessional poet vanishes into the intricacy of her verse). Better this honest, unsentimental, and unapologetic self-appraisal than the behavior in fashion now: a lot of ineffectual hand-wringing about privilege by people who couldn't divest themselves of it if they wanted to (and they don't).
Bishop's self-awareness will not excuse for many contemporary readers the other poems in the "Brazil" section, the ones that today would be dismissed as appropriations: neither the jaunty, poignant ballad of "The Burglar of Babylon" nor the remarkable magic-realist fable, based on Amazonian lore, of "The Riverman":
When the moon burns white
and the river makes that sound
like a primus pumped up high—
that fast, high whispering
like a hundred people at once—
I'll be there below...
And certainly not "Manuelzinho," a dramatic monologue spoken by a "friend of the writer." Bishop is here using "friend" the way my grandmother tended to use it, as a euphemism for a gay person's partner: the speaker is the rather aristocratic Lota de Macedo Soares, and the subject is her eponymous live-in servant with his maddening, quirky ways:
And once I yelled at you
so loud to hurry up
and fetch me those potatoes
your holey hat flew off,
you jumped out of your clogs,
leaving three objects arranged
in a triangle at my feet,
as if you'd been a gardener
in a fairy tale all this time
and at the word "potatoes"
had vanished to take up your work
of fairy prince somewhere.
She resolves at the conclusion to love him and implicitly to treat him with more personal respect, though I reflect that even Tolstoy tried to improve material and educational conditions for the peasants of his estate, not just to change his own frame of mind:
You paint—heaven knows why—
the outside of the crown
and brim of your straw hat.
Perhaps to reflect the sun?
Or perhaps when you were small,
your mother said, "Manuelzinho,
one thing; be sure you always
paint your straw hat."
One was gold for a while,
but the gold wore off, like plate.
One was bright green. Unkindly,
I called you Klorophyll Kid.
My visitors thought it was funny.
I apologize here and now.
You helpless, foolish man,
I love you all I can,
I think. Or I do?
I take off my hat, unpainted
and figurative, to you.
Again I promise to try.
While Bishop could be read as mocking the high-handed speaker as much as the object of this speaker's arrogant derision and even more arrogant sympathy—such a send-up is a customary use for the dramatic monologue—even this just reinforces the smug superiority of the poem's humor. It's not my favorite in the collection.
The second half of the volume, called "Elsewhere," leaves Bishop's Brazilian present for her past, largely in Nova Scotia, where she spent her childhood raised by her grandparents after her father's death and her mother's institutionalization. Like the poet's notebook writing that concludes "Questions of Travel," the end of the book roots its early abstractions and excursions in the poet's own contingent circumstances.
If Bishop had earlier written, "home, / wherever that may be," we begin to understand why when we read the volume's strangest piece, the autobiographical short story "In the Village." This prose narrative recounts a childhood idyll spent away from home: home is where her mother, losing her grip on sanity, screams—a scream that haunts the whole reminiscence and the whole of Bishop's childhood ("A scream...hangs there forever, a slight stain in those pure blue skies"). Her taste for travel, we realize, begins in this escape from disintegrating maternity, this forced expulsion from the nest, with her energetic errands all around the village.
These early travels bring her into contact with the warm physicality of animal life and with the many vital and inspiriting varieties of earthly labor in contrast to her mother's neuroticizing immurement in finery. I think particularly of Nate the blacksmith, the ring of whose hammer on metal Bishop plays in counterpoint to her mother's scream: the defense against madness's noise is the clear ring of craft and the mystery of art.
In the blacksmith’s shop things hang up in the shadows and shadows hang up in the things, and there are black and glistening piles of dust in each corner. A tub of night-black water stands by the forge. The horseshoes sail through the dark like bloody little moons and follow each other like bloody little moons to drown in the black water, hissing, protesting.
(A later corollary in the collection is "Sestina," another portrayal, this time in a most demanding poetic form, of the poet's surreally chaotic childhood: "Time to plant tears, says the almanac.")
"In the Village" is an ars poetica in prose. Yet as prose it calls on fictional as well as poetic tradition: it reminds me of the earlier stories in Dubliners that grew out of Joyce's epiphanic vignettes, or of Katherine Mansfield's great, montage-like autobiographical stories of a New Zealand childhood in "Prelude" or "At the Bay," or even, closer to home, Hawthorne's genial but shadowed sketches of New England village life.
To conclude, the unease in the whole volume, perhaps its chief question, comes from those imbalances of gender and class identification evoked again and again. The poet sympathizes now with Portuguese colonists, now with the village blacksmith, and yet she recoils too from a laboring masculinity that signifies at once salvifically conscientious craftsmanship and acquisitive global tyranny.
The critique of masculine imperialism is welcome, but, as with "Manuelzinho," when the female spectator looks down on her male social inferiors, we are reminded that a host of anticolonial and postcolonial thinkers linked feminist politics or female literature to imperialism, from James Joyce's observation that Daniel Defoe invented both feminism and imperialism in his two most famous protagonists, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, to Edward Said's censure of Jane Austen and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's rebuke to Charlotte Brontë and Jean Rhys.
Nowhere is Bishop's ambivalence more evident in Questions of Travel than in the charming and disgusting late piece "Filling Station." This poem expresses the speaker's campily exaggerated abhorrence at the filth of the titular locale and the males who work there and her appreciation of the silent female labor that maintains whatever aesthetic standards the dirty place manages to evince:
Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO—SO—SO—SO
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.
Real genius is always tasteless and troubling, and so with the last line. It brings the speaker's distanced-from-the-poet (because so overwrought) hauteur to a punchline climax. But it also makes a sincere feminist protest against the invisibility of female labor that subtends everyday life. In linking this creative labor to God (who "loves us all") it further portends female divinity and allies the poet, silent maker of the poem, to the cosmic Creator.
Yet its only half-ironic afflatus puts working men in their place; it is so like a certain strain of obtusely elite bourgeois feminism—I think of a celebrity feminist writer who notoriously berated a McDonald's employee for reinforcing the gender binary when he asked her if she wanted a boys' or a girls' Happy Meal—that I don't know whether to marvel or to throw the book at the wall.
I marvel. I'm no poetry expert, but of the so-far canonical midcentury American poets I've read (Lowell, Berryman, Ginsberg, Plath, etc.), Bishop has always struck me as the only unambiguous great. Like all the greats, she is, as the kids say, problematic. Moral and political rectitude is always an oversimplification of this incorrigible world, so it is only given to lesser lights.
Bishop knows it. Questions of Travel ends with "Visits to St. Elizabeth's," a nursery rhyme on the model of "The House that Jack Built" about Bishop's sojourns to see Ezra Pound in the mental hospital where he was held in lieu of being shot for treason. The poem's escalating and repeating motifs build to an astonishing thunder. Adjectives Bishop attaches to Pound, "the poet, the man," throughout: tragic, talkative, honored, old, brave, cranky, cruel, busy, tedious, wretched. While I have no sympathy for Pound's particular form of transgression (Bishop didn't either), I want that list on a T-shirt, or my tombstone.
August 16, 2022
Brazil is more colorful but less careful than Elsewhere.
June 14, 2022
Meio triste que eu só fui ouvir no nome de Bishop no meio da confusão da 18° flip. Tem momentos que abraçar as contradições fica fora de lugar.
Livro bonito, como as corujas caçando rãs gordas em plena cópula.
Livro bonito, como as corujas caçando rãs gordas em plena cópula.
December 29, 2015
A really nice collection of poems about travel that is so unsentimental. Where other writers would take a theme or event and make it wet and heavy, Bishop approaches it coolly - there's something nearly cruel and vicious about the way she deals with tragedy and sadness. I love most of these poems. This book was seriously fantastic!
April 4, 2021
I may be biased, but the poems about brazil are by far my favorite.
The burglar of babylon is spectaculae.
The burglar of babylon is spectaculae.
March 24, 2021
Good stuff! It's clear from this quite short collection that Bishop is a great writer, both in the poems and the short story. My only problem with it was that I struggled to really make out what Bishop's attitude towards Brazil was. At points it seemed condescending, but it's also clear that Bishop is a nuanced writer and I doubt she'd be uncritical of her own stance, so I'm unsure. I read this for uni and haven't had the seminar yet so that might become a bit more clear when I think about it more.
January 7, 2023
An excellent collection of pieces that each feels of a different time and place. I really enjoyed the mix of different forms and styles Bishop uses. Whether focused on a scene, person, place, or story, each poem is well-observed and inviting.
Standouts: Filling Station, Questions of Travel, The Riverman, The Burglar of Babylon, and The Armadillo.
The short story, In the Village, was not to my liking. It is certainly written well and makes me want to read other stories by Bishop, but this one was just not for me.
Standouts: Filling Station, Questions of Travel, The Riverman, The Burglar of Babylon, and The Armadillo.
The short story, In the Village, was not to my liking. It is certainly written well and makes me want to read other stories by Bishop, but this one was just not for me.
November 23, 2013
Elizabeth Bishop's first two collections were written during the poet's early life ranging up and down the Eastern Seaboard, the observational poems within are inspired by experiences in Nova Scotia, New England or Florida. Her third collection Questions of Travel is very different indeed, for in late 1951 at the age of 40, Bishop set off for Brazil (where she would remain for 15 years) after beginning a relationship with the architect Lota de Macedo Soares. Suddenly Bishop's careful eye came to focus with ethnographical curiosity on South America.
Indeed, the very first poem in the collection recounts the arrival of Bishop's steamer in the Brazil port city of Santos:
Once Bishop landed, local colour took over her poetry. There are two poems on squatters settling around Rio de Janeiro, a long ballad on a notorious criminal that escaped prison and was shot by police in his home shantytown he fled to for refuge, and mentions of indigenous Amazonian practices.
Not all of the book is set in Brazil, however. The second half of the book is titled “Elsewhere” and consists of poems and recollections from the United States. Probably the most famous poem in the book, and in Bishop's entire career, is "Visits to St. Elizabeth", written when Bishop was Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress and often went to see Ezra Pound, then locked up in an insane asylum. Bishop casts the poem in the form of the children's rhyme "This is the house that Jack built":
But the material in “Elsewhere” is mainly concerned with Bishop's childhood, which was a sad one as her father died early and her mother went mad and had to be institutionalized, leaving Bishop to be brought up by her parents in Nova Scotia. The prose piece “In the Village”, the only one in this book and the first to ever appear in a Bishop collection, is an episode from that Nova Scotia childhood (with the madness of her mother lurking always in the background) and captures remarkably well the wonder children feel when the world around them is so big and foreign. “In a Filling Station”, “First Death in Nova Scotia” and “Sestina” also look back to a childhood before 1920 or so.
I must admit, I was disappointed by this third collection by Bishop after loving A Cold Spring and North and South. Bishop gets so caught up in South American exotica that the poems lack the more universal meanings. Plus, the Brazil poems are long-winded and don't have the concision of earlier Bishop. I've started wondering if drink (Bishop had a lifelong struggle with alcoholism) was starting to have a detrimental effect on her poetry. In any event, the best introduction to Bishop is the Library of America volume (ISBN 1598530178) of poems, prose and letters, and if you get that, you'll have Questions of Travel too.
Indeed, the very first poem in the collection recounts the arrival of Bishop's steamer in the Brazil port city of Santos:
Here is a coast, here is a harbor
here, after a meager diet of horizon is some scenery:
impractically shaped and -- who knows? -- self-pitying mountains
sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery. ... Oh, tourist
is this how this country is going to answer you / and your immodest demands for a different world, / and for a better life?
Once Bishop landed, local colour took over her poetry. There are two poems on squatters settling around Rio de Janeiro, a long ballad on a notorious criminal that escaped prison and was shot by police in his home shantytown he fled to for refuge, and mentions of indigenous Amazonian practices.
Not all of the book is set in Brazil, however. The second half of the book is titled “Elsewhere” and consists of poems and recollections from the United States. Probably the most famous poem in the book, and in Bishop's entire career, is "Visits to St. Elizabeth", written when Bishop was Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress and often went to see Ezra Pound, then locked up in an insane asylum. Bishop casts the poem in the form of the children's rhyme "This is the house that Jack built":
This is the house of Bedlam. This is the man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is the time of the tragic man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is a wristwatch telling the time of the talkative man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is a sailor wearing the watch that tells the time of the honored man that lies in the house of Bedlam. ... This is a Jew in a newspaper hat that dances carefully down the ward, walking the plank of a coffin board with the crazy sailor that shows his watch that tells the time of the wretched man that lies in the house of Bedlam.
But the material in “Elsewhere” is mainly concerned with Bishop's childhood, which was a sad one as her father died early and her mother went mad and had to be institutionalized, leaving Bishop to be brought up by her parents in Nova Scotia. The prose piece “In the Village”, the only one in this book and the first to ever appear in a Bishop collection, is an episode from that Nova Scotia childhood (with the madness of her mother lurking always in the background) and captures remarkably well the wonder children feel when the world around them is so big and foreign. “In a Filling Station”, “First Death in Nova Scotia” and “Sestina” also look back to a childhood before 1920 or so.
I must admit, I was disappointed by this third collection by Bishop after loving A Cold Spring and North and South. Bishop gets so caught up in South American exotica that the poems lack the more universal meanings. Plus, the Brazil poems are long-winded and don't have the concision of earlier Bishop. I've started wondering if drink (Bishop had a lifelong struggle with alcoholism) was starting to have a detrimental effect on her poetry. In any event, the best introduction to Bishop is the Library of America volume (ISBN 1598530178) of poems, prose and letters, and if you get that, you'll have Questions of Travel too.
August 18, 2017
Poetry can be explicably pleasing sometimes. Especially for the amateur poetry reader, it's hard to explain why a collection or a particular poem works. Questions of Travel is pure pleasure. There is nothing over-clever or obviously inventive or new about Bishop's poems. They contain an element of narrative, of diary-like confession, of fly-on-the-wall observation that reads like storytelling in the true sense. In a short space and few words, Bishop evokes a scene, a place, and fills it with colour and emotion. Essentially that is what makes travel beautiful.
The collection is split into two. The first half are entitled 'Brazil' and are travel tales beginning with 'Arrival at Santos' and diverging into less personal poems as she delves deeper into her destination and discovers its sight, sounds and stories. The opening trio are magical, capturing that sense of arriving somewhere new, of being displaced but fascinated by a new country, and the third 'Questions of Travel' is the best of the lot. She concentrates on the little details that inform our memories, especially when travelling, on a tiny green hummingbird, a broken gasoline pump or a sunset. But it is full of dreams and questions too, one in particular - "Is it the lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places?" "Should we have stayed at home, whenever that may be?"
A lot of the poems that follow are narrative in a sense, stories watched by the outsider, the traveller. 'Manuelzinho', 'The Burglar of Babylon' and 'The Riverman' have an air of folk tale mixed with social commentary. Others like 'Electrical Storm' and 'Song for the Rainy Season' paint pictures of travelling scenes. All of them are great. The second half, called 'Elsewhere', looks back at those questions of home and seems to make the point that everwhere, at home or on the road, can paint a picture for us. While the longer, prose poem 'In the Village' is somewhat disappointing the rest are almost as good as the first half. 'Sandpiper' and 'Filling Station' are particularly evocative. The final poem, 'Visits to St. Elisabeths' shows a more playful side to Bishop's poetry - a strictly structured poem that reads like a nusery rhyme with it's song-like repetitions. From start to finish a brilliant collection. 8
The collection is split into two. The first half are entitled 'Brazil' and are travel tales beginning with 'Arrival at Santos' and diverging into less personal poems as she delves deeper into her destination and discovers its sight, sounds and stories. The opening trio are magical, capturing that sense of arriving somewhere new, of being displaced but fascinated by a new country, and the third 'Questions of Travel' is the best of the lot. She concentrates on the little details that inform our memories, especially when travelling, on a tiny green hummingbird, a broken gasoline pump or a sunset. But it is full of dreams and questions too, one in particular - "Is it the lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places?" "Should we have stayed at home, whenever that may be?"
A lot of the poems that follow are narrative in a sense, stories watched by the outsider, the traveller. 'Manuelzinho', 'The Burglar of Babylon' and 'The Riverman' have an air of folk tale mixed with social commentary. Others like 'Electrical Storm' and 'Song for the Rainy Season' paint pictures of travelling scenes. All of them are great. The second half, called 'Elsewhere', looks back at those questions of home and seems to make the point that everwhere, at home or on the road, can paint a picture for us. While the longer, prose poem 'In the Village' is somewhat disappointing the rest are almost as good as the first half. 'Sandpiper' and 'Filling Station' are particularly evocative. The final poem, 'Visits to St. Elisabeths' shows a more playful side to Bishop's poetry - a strictly structured poem that reads like a nusery rhyme with it's song-like repetitions. From start to finish a brilliant collection. 8
March 24, 2017
UPDATE: The more I read of Yeats, Merrill, and Ginsberg, the less I think of other poets. And right now, my second reading of Homer's Illiad is just blowing me away. Originally, I had rated this a four star read, but I can't even recall reading it, so I've taken away a star.
ORIGINAL REVIEW
I enjoyed this more than two previous collections by Bishop . I particularly liked the end of a poem entitled "Questions of Travel":
"Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there...No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"
I think we've all questioned ourselves about the definition of home. And another poem, "First Death in Nova Scotia" is haunting and beautiful. Bishop observes, in "Filling Station", a dilapidated shack behind the pumps. She questions the placement of an extraneous begonia and an embroidered doily on worn wickerwork. But "somebody embroidered the doily" and "somebody waters the plant" so Bishop concludes that "Somebody loves us all".
ORIGINAL REVIEW
I enjoyed this more than two previous collections by Bishop . I particularly liked the end of a poem entitled "Questions of Travel":
"Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there...No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"
I think we've all questioned ourselves about the definition of home. And another poem, "First Death in Nova Scotia" is haunting and beautiful. Bishop observes, in "Filling Station", a dilapidated shack behind the pumps. She questions the placement of an extraneous begonia and an embroidered doily on worn wickerwork. But "somebody embroidered the doily" and "somebody waters the plant" so Bishop concludes that "Somebody loves us all".
April 11, 2016
I'm currently working my way through Elizabeth Bishop's oeuvre. Her habitual dispassionateness still leaves me cold at times (I realize that many critics consider this quality to be one of Bishop's crown virtues); still, over time, I've developed appreciation for her intelligence and her uncompromising embrace of complexity. I've heard more than one of my acquaintances rave with what I feel is inordinate enthusiasm about the greatness of the Bishop poem entitled "Sestina," but I think the received form in which Bishop does her best work in this collection is the ballad form: in "The Burglar of Babylon," she makes writing a traditional-style ballad seem easy, which it most definitely is not.
January 8, 2019
I’ve found the first half of the book (the poems) a bit arrogant, and the second half charming with its childhood story.
The only reason I came to this book is from the wonderful biography of Clarice Lispector, where it’s described how Mrs. Bishop really liked her writings and encouraged her works to be translated into English. Later though she diminished her enthusiasm and found Lispector too local and simple. While it��s no competition, After reading this book there is no doubt in my mind that Lispector is unbelievably better than what she thought, touched by genius and magic, her writings touch timelessness, while bishop’s poetry is slouching in a colonial arrogance of a white lady among the Brazilians locals and a perspective which in this age is no longer easy to digest.
The only reason I came to this book is from the wonderful biography of Clarice Lispector, where it’s described how Mrs. Bishop really liked her writings and encouraged her works to be translated into English. Later though she diminished her enthusiasm and found Lispector too local and simple. While it��s no competition, After reading this book there is no doubt in my mind that Lispector is unbelievably better than what she thought, touched by genius and magic, her writings touch timelessness, while bishop’s poetry is slouching in a colonial arrogance of a white lady among the Brazilians locals and a perspective which in this age is no longer easy to digest.
May 27, 2015
This one contained the first poem of Bishop's that I ever read, "Sestina." I think many others are in that boat.
And while I love that poem, and many others in this collection, this was a bit off for some reason. Her language and imagery are nothing short of gorgeous, but some of the extended poems felt like they became too much, stretched on for too long.
Still, given my very basic interest in poetry, Bishop is at the top of my list for favorites.
And while I love that poem, and many others in this collection, this was a bit off for some reason. Her language and imagery are nothing short of gorgeous, but some of the extended poems felt like they became too much, stretched on for too long.
Still, given my very basic interest in poetry, Bishop is at the top of my list for favorites.
Read
April 4, 2011King Library (2nd floor) | PS3503.I785 Q4
July 11, 2024
*** this review is referring to the poem , “questions of travel” ***
"Oh, must we dream our dreams / and have them too?" (Bishop, lines 26-27).
------------
This review is probably not going to focus on the dominant interpretation, but just to address it briefly... I am currently at home. I have been at home for [redacted] years. I have not left this house for like, 5 full days. Last year at this time I think I was in Costa Rica. When it comes to travel specifically, 8 times out of 10, the answer is yes, you should go. I reserve 2/10 times for contingencies, but those other 8 times, yes. You should go. There is a reason why people travel. Getting to experience la vida cotidiana somewhere else is valuable. Seeing the wonders of the world is valuable. Being uncomfortable and learning lessons is valuable. Go on the trip.
Back to the non-dominant interpretation. I have been thinking recently about how everyone loves risk-takers. People write about those who leave home to fly across the world for school. People remember those who gave up their middle and high school years to train in green basements for a chance at becoming a star. People remember those who poured all of their money into their little tech startup before it became the biggest company in the world. But people who don’t do things that are perceived as risky spend just as many sleepless nights alone. No one remembers the one who lives at home and goes to a state school. No one remembers the person who got the application form, filled it out, and forgot it at home. No one remembers the person who saved the little they earned from their high school minimum wage job to help their family instead of pursuing their dreams. These examples encompass different ideas, but yeah. I’ve just been thinking about what I could have been, if I was more… Selfish? Not an only child? More willing to try when it comes to math? Because I am the one who both doesn’t lack imagination and stays at home. I could have been a doctor. I could have been a famous person (doubtful). I could have been going to school miles away from home right now, living it up on the east coast, but I am anxious and I thought about things like age gaps between my parents and I and the cost of college and mortality and never let myself dream. It's not like I wouldn't like to live somewhere else, or that I hate travel, or that I hate being alone. I'm an annoying introvert who likes to do stuff alone. If you place any stock in astrology (which I don't, but I went down a rabbit hole once), I'm a Sagittarius, which the Internet tells me means I'm a fickle, adventure-loving partier and traveler. They were wrong about the party thing, but I do want to go places and I want to experience things. No one talks about people that take risks by not doing things. I don't know. This is like too many ideas trying to be addressed at once. This is stream of consciousness from a reallllly tired lit minor. Too much for this poem? Maybe. Sorry.
"Oh, must we dream our dreams / and have them too?" (Bishop, lines 26-27).
------------
This review is probably not going to focus on the dominant interpretation, but just to address it briefly... I am currently at home. I have been at home for [redacted] years. I have not left this house for like, 5 full days. Last year at this time I think I was in Costa Rica. When it comes to travel specifically, 8 times out of 10, the answer is yes, you should go. I reserve 2/10 times for contingencies, but those other 8 times, yes. You should go. There is a reason why people travel. Getting to experience la vida cotidiana somewhere else is valuable. Seeing the wonders of the world is valuable. Being uncomfortable and learning lessons is valuable. Go on the trip.
Back to the non-dominant interpretation. I have been thinking recently about how everyone loves risk-takers. People write about those who leave home to fly across the world for school. People remember those who gave up their middle and high school years to train in green basements for a chance at becoming a star. People remember those who poured all of their money into their little tech startup before it became the biggest company in the world. But people who don’t do things that are perceived as risky spend just as many sleepless nights alone. No one remembers the one who lives at home and goes to a state school. No one remembers the person who got the application form, filled it out, and forgot it at home. No one remembers the person who saved the little they earned from their high school minimum wage job to help their family instead of pursuing their dreams. These examples encompass different ideas, but yeah. I’ve just been thinking about what I could have been, if I was more… Selfish? Not an only child? More willing to try when it comes to math? Because I am the one who both doesn’t lack imagination and stays at home. I could have been a doctor. I could have been a famous person (doubtful). I could have been going to school miles away from home right now, living it up on the east coast, but I am anxious and I thought about things like age gaps between my parents and I and the cost of college and mortality and never let myself dream. It's not like I wouldn't like to live somewhere else, or that I hate travel, or that I hate being alone. I'm an annoying introvert who likes to do stuff alone. If you place any stock in astrology (which I don't, but I went down a rabbit hole once), I'm a Sagittarius, which the Internet tells me means I'm a fickle, adventure-loving partier and traveler. They were wrong about the party thing, but I do want to go places and I want to experience things. No one talks about people that take risks by not doing things. I don't know. This is like too many ideas trying to be addressed at once. This is stream of consciousness from a reallllly tired lit minor. Too much for this poem? Maybe. Sorry.
January 24, 2021
I really don't know what I am reading yet - it's still poetry and I am still a newbie, it's poetry by an author I have not read, a white woman from New England who wrote from the 1920's - 1970's, and I have not read any reviews or biographies telling me what to think or how to put Questions of Travel in context.
What I do know after a first, serious but not surgical read of the collection:
Questions of Travel was published in 1965 and dedicated to Lota de Macedo Soares with whom Bishop lived for some years in Brazil.
There are two main parts - "Brazil" and "Elsewhere".
"Brazil" begins with the poem "Arrival at Santos" which sets up the poet/the narrator/Bishop as a tourist with "immodest demands for a different world,/ and a better life, and complete comprehension/ of both at last, and immediately" and ends with one of a number of poems Bishop writes focusing on people living in poverty in Brazil. By framing the poems as "questions of travel" and herself as a sort of bumbling, clueless tourist, Bishop recognizes her perspective as she does not mistake herself for a Brazilian, yet she seems to accept her privileges as a guest of the propertied of Brazil, the landowners without many questions, even as she focuses on the dispossessed, "the squatters" and "the fearful stain" "on the fair green hills of Rio" - "The poor who come to Rio/ and can't go home again."
The poems in "Brazil" are filled with mountains and hills - "there are too many waterfalls here" - "on the unbreathing sides of hills/ they play" - "Titled above me, you gardens/ ravish my eyes" - and the poems move up and down, maybe between nature on high, gardens, children, the poor, owls and threats to that nature below, either by accident as with the "frail, illegal fire balloons" or by violence "So the soldiers swarmed again/ Up the hill of Babylon" or by other means.
"Elsewhere" is full of the northern North American Atlantic coast, wagons being passed by automobiles, grandparents, the funeral of little cousin Arthur. From Nova Scotia and British royalty to Washington and the miasma of the Potomac - very much the northern Atlantic world. "Sandpiper" is the only quirky, quick reprieve "The roaring alongside he takes for granted/ and that every so often the world is bound to shake./ He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,/ in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake."
These are beginning notes; I hope to know more later when I have read more and this collection over again.
What I do know after a first, serious but not surgical read of the collection:
Questions of Travel was published in 1965 and dedicated to Lota de Macedo Soares with whom Bishop lived for some years in Brazil.
There are two main parts - "Brazil" and "Elsewhere".
"Brazil" begins with the poem "Arrival at Santos" which sets up the poet/the narrator/Bishop as a tourist with "immodest demands for a different world,/ and a better life, and complete comprehension/ of both at last, and immediately" and ends with one of a number of poems Bishop writes focusing on people living in poverty in Brazil. By framing the poems as "questions of travel" and herself as a sort of bumbling, clueless tourist, Bishop recognizes her perspective as she does not mistake herself for a Brazilian, yet she seems to accept her privileges as a guest of the propertied of Brazil, the landowners without many questions, even as she focuses on the dispossessed, "the squatters" and "the fearful stain" "on the fair green hills of Rio" - "The poor who come to Rio/ and can't go home again."
The poems in "Brazil" are filled with mountains and hills - "there are too many waterfalls here" - "on the unbreathing sides of hills/ they play" - "Titled above me, you gardens/ ravish my eyes" - and the poems move up and down, maybe between nature on high, gardens, children, the poor, owls and threats to that nature below, either by accident as with the "frail, illegal fire balloons" or by violence "So the soldiers swarmed again/ Up the hill of Babylon" or by other means.
"Elsewhere" is full of the northern North American Atlantic coast, wagons being passed by automobiles, grandparents, the funeral of little cousin Arthur. From Nova Scotia and British royalty to Washington and the miasma of the Potomac - very much the northern Atlantic world. "Sandpiper" is the only quirky, quick reprieve "The roaring alongside he takes for granted/ and that every so often the world is bound to shake./ He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,/ in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake."
These are beginning notes; I hope to know more later when I have read more and this collection over again.
August 15, 2022
Bishop's use of adjectives is excellent and revealing. She's very good at the adjectival run, which is difficult to pull off. In one of her best and best-loved poems, 'The Moose', for example, there's the 'shifting, salty, thin' fog, a 'brisk, freckled, elderly' woman, 'hairy, scratchy, splintery' woods, and finally the 'towering, antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house, (or, safe as houses)... perfectly harmless... big... plain... grand, otherworldly... curious' moose itself. Amazing how she gets away with this kind of thing!
I wonder if anybody goes in for colour adjectives more than Bishop. Here are all the ones in this collection: 'feeble pink, or blue... green... bright blue... blue, blue-green and olive... satin... silver-gray... purple, yellow, two yellows, pink, rust-red and greenish white... blue-white... pale-green... hell-green... red as a red-hot wire... green... pink... brown... silver... golden... yellow... white... silver... red... white... white... blue... pale-blue... bright-blue... white... gold... gold... bright-green... yellow... bleached white... pink... dead-white, wax-white... red... purple... rainbow-ridden... blood-black... brown... white... milk-white... silver... tinted... pale green... black-and-white stained bright pink... rose-flecked... white... green... grey-green... white... green and gold... yellow... pale-green... silver... white... gray... black... white... white... pewter-colored... tin, lead and silver... green... yellow... white... green... black... dark-brown... white... white... red... red... white... white... red... white... red... black... gray... blue... gray... black-and-gold... dark... black, white, tan, and gray... quartz... rose and amethyst... whitewashed'. This is a measure of just how much a drive to classify and atomise motivates her description. I'm not entirely sure why this is, but I get the sense she looks out at things to look away from herself, and pins down those things (or, to use her own metaphor, maps them) as a defensive response to change and loss.
Bishop is a brilliant poet and this is a superb collection.
I wonder if anybody goes in for colour adjectives more than Bishop. Here are all the ones in this collection: 'feeble pink, or blue... green... bright blue... blue, blue-green and olive... satin... silver-gray... purple, yellow, two yellows, pink, rust-red and greenish white... blue-white... pale-green... hell-green... red as a red-hot wire... green... pink... brown... silver... golden... yellow... white... silver... red... white... white... blue... pale-blue... bright-blue... white... gold... gold... bright-green... yellow... bleached white... pink... dead-white, wax-white... red... purple... rainbow-ridden... blood-black... brown... white... milk-white... silver... tinted... pale green... black-and-white stained bright pink... rose-flecked... white... green... grey-green... white... green and gold... yellow... pale-green... silver... white... gray... black... white... white... pewter-colored... tin, lead and silver... green... yellow... white... green... black... dark-brown... white... white... red... red... white... white... red... white... red... black... gray... blue... gray... black-and-gold... dark... black, white, tan, and gray... quartz... rose and amethyst... whitewashed'. This is a measure of just how much a drive to classify and atomise motivates her description. I'm not entirely sure why this is, but I get the sense she looks out at things to look away from herself, and pins down those things (or, to use her own metaphor, maps them) as a defensive response to change and loss.
Bishop is a brilliant poet and this is a superb collection.
Read
November 20, 2023Sestina
September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.
She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,
It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac
on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.
It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.
But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.
September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.
She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,
It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac
on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.
It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.
But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.
August 1, 2021
"Here is a coast; here is a harbor;
here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery:
impractically shaped and—who knows?—self-pitying mountains,
sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery,
with a little church on top of one. And warehouses,
some of them painted a feeble pink, or blue,
and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist,
is this how this country is going to answer you
and your immodest demands for a different world,
and a better life, and complete comprehension
of both at last, and immediately,
after eighteen days of suspension?"
"Like a first coat of whitewash when it’s wet,
the thin gray mist lets everything show through:
the black boy Balthazár, a fence, a horse,
a foundered house,
—cement and rafters sticking from a dune.
(The Company passes off these white but shopworn
dunes as lawns.) “Shipwreck,” we say; perhaps
this is a housewreck.
The sea’s off somewhere, doing nothing. Listen.
An expelled breath."
here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery:
impractically shaped and—who knows?—self-pitying mountains,
sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery,
with a little church on top of one. And warehouses,
some of them painted a feeble pink, or blue,
and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist,
is this how this country is going to answer you
and your immodest demands for a different world,
and a better life, and complete comprehension
of both at last, and immediately,
after eighteen days of suspension?"
"Like a first coat of whitewash when it’s wet,
the thin gray mist lets everything show through:
the black boy Balthazár, a fence, a horse,
a foundered house,
—cement and rafters sticking from a dune.
(The Company passes off these white but shopworn
dunes as lawns.) “Shipwreck,” we say; perhaps
this is a housewreck.
The sea’s off somewhere, doing nothing. Listen.
An expelled breath."
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 18, 2021
Very interesting. As usual you have issues of perception and veracity and poetic distant present, as they are in all of Bishop's poetry collections. But Questions of Travel also depicts all sorts of travels or, more accurately, movements: colonisation, exploration, sightseeing, death. Bishop observes and writes with a humannist, self-reflexive touch which gives her poetry its gentleness and poignance. My favourite so far is 'Questions of Travel'; 'But surely it would have been a pity | not to have seen the trees along this road' is a line that strikes very differently in this current age of lockdowns and restrictions.
December 17, 2021
The first half of poems, set in Brazil, convey Bishop’s complex relationship with the land she spent eighteen years of her life in. Here, Bishop complicates the notion of an idealized place through anecdotal poems, Brazilian folklore, and distinct mise en scène—the spectre of settler colonialism looming over it all. The second set of poems are good, but don’t speak as strongly. Maybe it’s her reticence to give up herself as a poet in lieu of the human? Yet, there’s still so much to glean from them. If anything, they better display her mastery of poetic form.
June 27, 2024
I've been reading through Bishop's work. This collection, mostly inspired by her time in Brazil, is more accessible than her earlier work, but despite being inspired by her travels, it feels abstracted from the personal. The poems are charming, but there is no real urgency in them, and I was not particularly drawn in by many of the subjects. There were a few poems that I enjoyed, and I reread those two or three times each before moving on to the next, but on the whole, it is not a collection I'll likely revisit.
August 18, 2025
The adoration of Bishop’s poems by American critics and writers remains a mystery to me. Sharp observation, yes. Good handling of form, yes. But the much-praised reticence feels as much as anything a refusal to deal with emotion. Her prose is generally better than her verse, though the autobiographical piece in this book is too long and flat.
March 20, 2021
I really enjoyed reading these poems. A lot of them caused me to experience an "ah-ha!" moment. I wasn't expecting to be a short story in the middle of the book, but I enjoyed that, too. Great symbolism. Profound ideas all around.
April 24, 2021
Para Bishop, todo detalhe é importante. A poesia dela não se faz pela invenção de imagens, mas pela conexão de tudo o que ela vê. É o momento e o que é visto nele que dão a singularidade da vida. Se uma vida não vale ser poesia por viver na autenticidade do momento, então o que dela valeria?
May 26, 2021
Dreamy and unflinching portrait of Bishop's periods of travel and nomadism. I personally preferred the delicate intimacy of the Elsewhere segments than the colourful but more distant, voyeuristic tone of Brazil.
July 14, 2022
Out of her 4 poetry collections, Questions is her weakest, but that doesn't mean that this isn't good, it just had some filler. Highlights ~ "Questions Of Travel" "Squatter's Children " "Electrical Storm" "The Riverman" "The Burglar of Babylon" "Manners" and "Sandpiper".
November 10, 2017
"It is lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places, not just stay at home?"
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