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.