POETRY IN REVIEW

1 6 7 R P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W S T E P H E N Y E N S E R Elizabeth Bishop’s body of work, like that of Stéphane Mallarmé, was once known for its slender excellence. She published four compact volumes of poems at a regular rate, more or less one a decade (North & South in 1946, A Cold Spring in 1955, Questions of Travel in 1965, and Geography III in 1976). It is as though her career had four seasons and began in winter – for Mallarmé, ‘‘la saison intellectuelle créatrice.’’ The subtle early verse, like the ‘‘Imaginary Iceberg’’ looming over the first book, was ‘‘self-made from elements least visible,’’ and poems as di√erently and intricately crafted as ‘‘The Map,’’ ‘‘A Miracle for Breakfast,’’ and ‘‘Roosters ’’ seemed to cut their ‘‘facets from within.’’ ‘‘A Cold Spring’’ began the second volume colorfully with ‘‘a violet . . . flawed on the E l i z a b e t h B i s h o p a n d T h e N e w Yo r k e r : T h e C o m p l e t e C o r r e s p o n d e n c e , edited by Joelle Biele (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 496 pp., $35). P r o s e , by Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Lloyd Schwartz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 528 pp., $20 paper). P o e m s , by Elizabeth Bishop (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 368 pp., $16 paper). P r o s e a n d P o e m s , by Elizabeth Bishop (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 896 pp., boxed set, $75). 1 6 8 Y E N S E R Y lawn’’ and ‘‘a grave green dust’’ settling over ‘‘big and aimless hills’’; the birth of a calf (who forthwith, in a phrase more resonant now than it was then, though its current import predates Bishop’s poem, ‘‘seemed inclined to feel gay’’); and a magnificently buoyant toast, as fireflies came out, began ‘‘to rise: / up, then down, then up again: / lit on the ascending flight, / drifting simultaneously to the same height, – / exactly like the bubbles in champagne.’’ Ostensibly a topographical poem, ‘‘A Cold Spring’’ is also an erotically tinged love lyric (in context, those hills have a bathycolpian look), and so is the little song that closes this second book, ‘‘The Shampoo .’’ (The preternaturally discreet New Yorker, we learn from Joelle Biele’s edition of Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence, would not publish ‘‘The Shampoo’’ because of its possible overtones, though as Bishop justly objected, ‘‘It’s just about washing [her lover’s] hair.’’) By the time of Questions of Travel, Bishop has moved to the southern latitudes, and her poetry is in full, flamboyant flower in the ‘‘Brazil’’ section. Geography III, an assemblage of just ten poems including ‘‘In the Waiting Room,’’ ‘‘Crusoe in England,’’ ‘‘The Moose,’’ ‘‘Poem,’’ ‘‘One Art,’’ and ‘‘The End of March,’’ might remind us in its utter autumnal fullness of the last period in Keats’s life, when he produced ‘‘The Eve of St. Agnes’’ and the odes. My factitious summary ignores the remarkable poems that followed Geography III – ‘‘Santarém,’’ ‘‘North Haven,’’ ‘‘Pink Dog,’’ and‘‘Sonnet’’portendedanotheroutstandingvolume–butitserves to suggest the short but almost miraculously sweet text that Bishop ’s oeuvre seemed to constitute. Then came the posthumous proliferation of publications and the all-too-lifelike muddling of boundaries between multiplied categories. The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (1983) interposes ‘‘Uncollected Work [1969]’’ between the third and fourth volumes, and then follows up Geography III with ‘‘New Poems [1979],’’ ‘‘Uncollected Poems’’ (including a subsection , ‘‘Occasional Poems’’), ‘‘Poems Written in Youth,’’ and finally ‘‘Translations,’’ from twenty-six Portuguese, French, and Spanish poems by eight authors. The Library of America’s Poems, Prose, and Letters (2008), in addition to adding prose, presents ‘‘Uncollected Work [1969]’’ as ‘‘from The Complete Poems’’ and turns ‘‘New Poems’’ into ‘‘Late Poems,’’ expands ‘‘Uncollected Poems ,’’ creates ‘‘Unpublished Poems and Drafts’’ to accommodate P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W 1...