Grit and polish

EDGAR ALLAN POE & THE JUKE-BOX: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments
by Elizabeth Bishop
edited by Alice Quinn
Farrar, Straus and Giroux $30, 367 pages

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), rightly considered one of the US’s finest poets, published only about 90 poems in her lifetime. She was famously reluctant to hand her work over to editors. She tinkered with typescripts for years, even decades, yet her poems retain a lightness of touch that belies such dedication.

The charm of Bishop’s poetry has often been attributed to a talent for “impersonating normality” despite a far from normal life. She was orphaned at an early age - her father died, her mother was declared insane. Her college sweetheart killed himself when she declined his proposal. Her greatest love, Lota de Macedo Soares, committed suicide. A peripatetic existence, took her from Massachusetts to New York, Nova Scotia, Key West, San Francisco, Paris, Mexico and Brazil.

It is not the high drama of her life that crystallises in her poetry, however, but the sense of displacement that came from being permanently uprooted. “Should we have stayed at home/ wherever that may be?” she asks in “Questions of Travel”.

Anyone who has taken pleasure in her work will rejoice at the appearance of Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box, an assortment of uncollected poems and fragments, compiled and annotated by The New Yorker’s poetry editor, Alice Quinn. “Thinking about poetry in the highest terms was instinctive... and meeting her own standards was almost impossible,” Quinn writes, “and this may account for the extraordinary quality of her unpublished work.”

There are portents of the life ahead in a poem written in Bishop’s teenage years: “I introduce Penelope Gwin,/ A friend of mine through thick and thin,/ Who’s travelled much in foreign parts,/ Pursuing culture and the arts./ ‘And also,’ says Penelope/ ‘This family life is not for me./ I find it leads to deep depression/ And I was born for self expression.’”

Despite her restlessness and curiosity, for Bishop travelling meant losing countries, landscapes and people. Poems such as “Good-Bye” dwell on the inevitable melancholy of departure. “You are leaving the earth/ but only a little distance/ ...but just that much is hard to do,/ it has cost other people centuries of effort/ and is costing us centuries of grief.” “In the golden early morning” is about another leave-taking: “You came to take me to the airport/ ...I kept wondering/ why we expose ourselves to these farewells & dangers/ ...So off I went & why do we undertake/ these terrifying & cruel trips & why did I come here.”

Bishop, who missed home from all around, lingers over homesickness like no other poet. Heartbreak is the price one pays for distance: “See, here, my distant dear, I lie/ Upon my hard, hard bed and sigh/ For someone far away/ Who never thinks of me at all/ Or thinking, does not care.”

Alongside the uncollected material, this volume contains early drafts of some of Bishop’s best-known poems. There are 16 versions of “One Art”, her quietly devastating reflection upon the death of Lota, published in its final form in 1976: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master;/ so many things seem filled with the intent/ to be lost that their loss is no disaster.” Here is that extraordinary thing, an open window into the poet’s mind as she vacillates, reconsiders, rewrites and pares down.

Few events in Bishop’s life seem to have had such an impact as her discovery of Brazil, where she spent “the fifteen happiest years of my life”. Even there, she was not free of travellers’ worries: “but my dollar goes higher and higher -/ exchange anxiety/ with a visa about to expire/ with a car with one good tire”.

Bishop fretted obsessively over her verse but never took herself too seriously. There are many instances of gentle self-deprecation, not the least endearing of which is a throwaway quatrain she inscribed in the guestbook of a small hotel in the mining town of Ouro Preto: “Let Shakespeare & Milton/ Stay at the Hilton -/ I shall stay/ At Chico Rei”.