Obsessions

Rauschenbusch continuedfrom previous page did we see You'V This book of poems contains Kenyon's life in all of its moods, from the recognition of being happy ("The Suitor") to the observation that a child's sweater in a psychiatrist's hands can be a straitjacket ("Starting Therapy"). The book is full and alive. bursting at the seams with its wonderful ElizabethBishop -like tropes and incisive observations. It is also, like much of Robert Lowell's poetry, ajournai of madness— a fine madness full of existential dread, an occasional hallucination, and a great deal of hardwon clarity. Stephanie Rauschenbusch is a Brooklyn artist whose poems have been published in Western Humanities Review, Heliotrope, New York Quarterly, ana* FIRE (Oxfordshire). Her chapbook The Heart's Ice Thaws, was published in Maastricht, Holland, by the artist Ben Leenen ofthe Elephantine Press. Obsessions Michael Benigni Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments Elizabeth Bishop Edited by Alice Quinn Farrar, Straus and Giroux http://www.fsgbooks.com 390 pages; cloth, $30.00 Let us say outright that this is not a book for everybody. For Bishop scholars and fans it is a must buy, of course. Those who teach Bishop on a regular basis may find it useful, particularly for the extensive notes and the material in the appendix. Poets and poetry lovers may enjoy it for their own quirky reasons. EdgarAllan Poe & the Juke-Box, edited by Alice Quinn (poetry editor of The New Yorker and executive director ofthe Poetry Society ofAmerica), over a decade in the making, contains 105 poems/ fragments that Bishop chose not to publish but, for whatever reason, to preserve in her notebooks and elsewhere. It is not a facsimile edition, as Quinn points out in her note on the text, but it does contain some facsimiles "to illustrate the range ofmanuscript material." It also contains an appendix with several short prose pieces as well as photographs of sixteen sequentially ordered drafts of her famous villanelle "One Art." The remainder of the book comprises an extensive set of notes, which contains variant versions of the poems, notebook entries and correspondences , revealing anecdotes, informal critiques, links to canonical poems, and other miscellaneous glosses, often all in a single note. Virtually all the material here has been gleaned from the more than 3,500 pages of manuscripts now housed at the Library for Special Collections at Vassar College. Whatever else this book is, however, it is certainly not a book for those who may be coming to Bishop for the first time. Except for a few short lyrics and one or two of the longer pieces, the material here rarely approaches, let alone sustains, the exacting standards Bishop demonstrated everywhere in The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 (1983). As Helen Vendler notes in her searing April 3 review in The New Republic: "Students wanting to buy 'the new book by Elizabeth Bishop' should be told to go back and buy the old one, where the poet represents herself as she wished to be known." 1 was a bit surprised by the vituperative verve Vendler displays in her trouncing of what clearly was, for Quinn, a long labor of love. Vendler suggests that a better title for the book would have been "The Repudiated Poems," and believes that had Bishop been asked beforehand whether her unpublished poems, as well as her fragments , should be published after herdeath, she would have replied with a horrified "No." Not only are these pieces embarrassingly flawed or inferior in Vendler's eyes, they are in fact not "real poems" from the "real" Elizabeth Bishop at all. And yet there is something a bit disturbing about the relish Vendler takes in excoriating these "maimed and stunted siblings." as she calls them. Of course, what to do with a dead writer's unpublished work is an age-old conundrum. Part of the problem, I think, is that this volume doesn't quite know the kind of book it wants to be. Quinn seems to have anticipated some ofthe reaction the book would receive. In an e-mail response to a New York Times reporter she states: "I knew that this perspective on it would be registered...