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Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Description by Zachariah Pickard McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009. 212 pages
A Poet's High Argument: Elizabeth Bishop and Christianity by Laurel Snow Corelle University of South Carolina Press, 2008. 139 pages
Nick Halpern
A new generation of scholars has taken over Elizabeth Bishop criticism, and to judge by two recent books about her poetry it is in capable hands. Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Description by Zachariah Pickard and A Poet's High Argument: Elizabeth Bishop and Christianity by Laurel Snow Corelle offer trenchant and valuable treatments of Bishop's poetry.
Both scholars concentrate on topics that Bishop readers might have thought had been sufficiently explored, and both show us how much more there is to these approaches than had previously been realized. Pickard's book deals with "something that anyone will grant [Bishop] but that few are interested in thinking about too closely: that her poetry is often concerned with the objective aspects of the physical world and that it conveys them to the reader with unusual force and clarity" (3). Noting that "'description' has become a ubiquitous but invisible word in Bishop scholarship-oft used but rarely discussed" (3), Pickard declares that his own ambition in this closely argued and perceptive study is to ask "what, exactly, description means to Bishop" (4). His book takes off from-and keeps returning to-"the Darwin Letter," the famous letter of 1964 to Anne Stevenson in which Bishop writes that
Dreams, works of art (some) glimpses of the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that seems enormously important. I can't believe we are wholly irrational-and I do admire Darwin! But reading Darwin, one admires the beautiful solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic-and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and then one feels the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown. What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration." (qtd. in Pickard 5)
Pickard's book,...