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PA RTISAN REVIEW
"The Map," the first poem in the volume, is a vivid revery on a
colored map. Reading it one is momentarily beguiled : is an actual map
or the physical topography itself being described? Then one comes on
the deliberate anticlimax of the last line: "More delicate than the his–
torians' are the mapmakers' colors." The line states the poet's aim: a
scrupulous representation of the world reduced in scale and line to
something like a cartographer's depiction of geographical areas.
It
is a
plan for suppressing rather than compressing contours, dimension, ton–
ality, emotion. A slow hard gaze moves behind the deliberately drawn–
out ironies. "Florida" is "the state that floats in brackish water,/ held
together by the mangrove roots/ that bear while living oysters in
clusters,! and when dead strew white swamps with skeletons...."
If
Miss Bishop is the poetic equivalent of the cartographer, she is
also the prosaic equivalent of the classical elegiac poet, with herons,
roosters, faithful servants, and fishhouses to praise instead of faithless
mistresses, athletes, honored statesmen, dead friends. She rarely tries to
relate events or undertake subjects that cannot be brought down to scale.
Few risks she takes away from scale come off as well as "The bull frogs
are sounding, slack strings plucked by heavy thumbs" ("A Cold Spring") .
More often, like good camera-eye realism, they achieve a tense but tidy
little vignette: "And in the brothels of Marrakesh/ the little pockmarked
prostitutes/ balanced their tea-trays on their heads/ and did their belly–
dances; flung themselves/ naked and giggling against our knees,! asking
for cigarettes" ("Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance").
At times the poet steps out in the direction of a controlled fantasying,
as in "The Imaginary Iceberg," "The Colder the Air," and "Wading
at Wellfleet." But whenever she pushes the fantasy too hard, the in–
sulating control of the irony unravels, and we get the prose-lavish
phanopoeia of "Man-Moth" or the exhausting ultra-gnomic distortions
of "A Miracle for Breakfast." In "The Weed," we sense that the subject,
like the crumb and drop of coffee in the "Miracle," is the center of
a huge hallucination, betraying the effort of projecting symbolically into
real objects with, and only with, the eye. The subject itself is fantasied
away. A similar disjunction occurs in "Monument," where an unre–
solved irony keeps turning the subject round and around, like a crumb
between the fingers, hopeful of transforming it into a loaf of bread.
But the strategy is self-defeating: a baneful asking of meaningful ques–
tions of a meaningless or essentially unmeaningful object. It is not so
much the effort which seems perverse as its particular disposition in
the poet's tidy scale. A matter of having one's cake and eating it too:
making an effort to give dimension to a flat world, the poet uses the
