Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Description by Zachariah Pickard, A Poet’s High Argument: Elizabeth Bishop and Christianity by Laurel Snow Corelle

Abstract

Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Description by Zachariah Pickard McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009. 212 pages A Poet's High Argument: Elizabeth and Christianity by Laurel Snow Corelle University of South. Carolina Press, 2008. 139 pages A new generation of scholars has taken over Elizabeth 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 and Christianity by Laurel Snow Corelle offer trenchant and valuable treatments of Bishop's poetry. Both scholars concentrate on topics that readers might have thought had been sufficiently explored, and both show us how much 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 objective aspects of physical world an.d that it conveys them to reader with unusual force and clarity (3). Noting that description' has become ubiquitous but invisible word in 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, famous letter of 1964 to Anne Stevenson in which writes that Dreams, works of art (some) glimpses of always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected moments of empathy (is it?), catch 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 beautiful solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic--and then comes sudden relaxation, forgetful phrase, and then one feels strangeness of his undertaking, sees lonely young elan, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into unknown. What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is same thing that is necessary for its creation, self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration. (qtd. in Pickard 5) Pickard's book, as he himself says, amounts to an exploration of this one paragraph (5). Almost every writer on. has had occasion to use sentences and phrases from this letter, but Pickard is first to subject it to close analysis. Engaging in careful examination of Bishop's language, he argues that to begin with perfectly useless concentration arid end by sliding off into unknown is precisely pattern that underlies Bishop's art of description. Description is fascinating subject--see Willard Spiegelman's important study, How Poets See 14'br Id: The Art of Description in Contemporary Poetry--and Pickard further explores richness and importance of topic. That said., one must note that Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Description is riot always easy to follow Pickard divides his book into chapters called Imagery, Surrealism, Epiphany, Water, War, Narrative, Travel, and Description. As these chapter titles suggest, Pickard likes to come at his subject from variety of angles--he refers to a variety of iterations and a variety of intensities (189)--and to let larger organization and argument of book reveal itself gradually. Because Pickard chooses this approach, however, it is not always immediately clear where his argument is going, or why he has chosen particular point of departure. In addition, he grounds his analyses not in Bishop's major poems but in more obscure, less personal--and descriptive verse of Bishop's first two books (12). …