This article was published in the Written Word supplement of the Irish Independent January 2016.
''All
my life I have lived and behaved very much like [the] sandpiper—just running
down the edges of different countries and continents, "looking for
something" ... having spent most of my life timorously seeking for subsistence
along the coastlines of the world.''
Over her 15 years on the Leaving Cert
course Bishop has appeared 5 times and consistently proves a popular choice
with students. Her conversational tone, eye for detail and exploration of
themes such as the search for identity, coming to terms with loss and childhood
memories, make her poetry very accessible for all ages, especially adolescents.
She was greatly feted in her lifetime
and won many distinguished accolades such as the Pulitzer Prize and National
Book Award.
Bishop had an incredibly tough childhood;
losing her father to Bright’s disease as a baby and losing her mother to mental
illness over the following few years. She was raised by relatives and inherited
money that allowed her to live independently but her poetry is characterised by
a longing and search for home. She also, paradoxically, greatly enjoyed travel;
as Niall MacMonagle noted she: ‘preferred geography to history’, and, rather
than wallowing in self-pity in her work, she tended to turn her attention
outwards to study the world around her in incredible detail.
The
Fish, Filling
Station, The Armadillo, The Bight and At the Fishhouses all display her skillful use of this razor-sharp
attention to detail. In these poems she invites the reader ‘to focus not on her but with her’ at some element of the natural or man-made world that
catches her eye. In The Fish she
delivers a masterclass in painting a word-picture of the ‘tremendous fish’. She recreates every inch of his ‘battered and venerable’ body, from the ‘brown skin hung in strips like ancient
wallpaper’ to ‘the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood’. She makes comparisons with ordinery domestic
objects so that those of us who have never set foot in a fishing boat can see
what she sees: ‘the irises backed and
packed with tranished tinfoil’.
Often she is so eager to get her
description right that she corrects herself in the middle of the poem: ‘It was more like the tipping of an object toward
the light.’ Michael Schmidt said of her voice that it ‘affirms, hesitates, corrects itself; the image comes clear to us as it
came clear to her.’ In Filling
Station she puzzles over the contradictions of sight before her: ‘Do they live in the station?’ ‘Why the
taboret? Why, oh why, the doily?’ She poses questions that occur to her in
the course of her observations and then attempts to answer them: ‘Somebody embroidered the doily. Somebody
waters the plant… Somebody loves us all.’
In the course of her travels she explored
exotic locations in Europe, North Africa and South America, some of which pop
up in her poems. The Armadillo
details the celebration of St John’s Day (24th June) in Brazil with
traditional (but illegal!) fire balloons and the havoc they inflict on the local
wildlife: ‘Last night another big one
fell. It splattered like an egg of fire against the cliff behind the house…The
ancient owls’ nest must have burned.’ In The Bight she examines Garrison Bight in Key West, Florida
recreating both the man-made and natural elements of the scene vividly: ‘Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar on
impalpable drafts and open their tails like scissors on the curves.’
She also investigates the nature of travel
itself, most memorably in Questions of
Travel. This poem explores the experience of being a tourist in a foreign
country, looking at waterfalls, mountains and ‘old stonework’. She wonders if tourism is really a good thing: ‘Is it right to be watching strangers in a
play in this strangest of theatres?’ or if our fantasies of exotic places
are actually ruined by visiting them: ‘Should
we have stayed at home and thought of here?...Oh, must we dream our dreams and
have them too?’ She celebrates the beauty of the place she is visiting and
feels sad at the thought of missing out on the experience:
‘But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the
trees along this road,
really exaggerated in
their beauty,
not to have seen them
gesturing
like noble pantomimists,
robed in pink.’
Ultimately her ponderings bring her back to
her own elusive search for home: Should
we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?’
It was later in life when she finally felt
able to write about her childhood experiences. Sestina, In the Waiting Room
and First Death in Nova Scotia were
all written in her 50s and explore a variety of memories from her childhood. In
Sestina she chooses to use a rigid,
traditional poetic form to explore probably the most difficult experience of
her life; her mother’s permanent confinement in a mental hospital. It details
the scene in a kitchen of a grandmother looking after her granddaughter from
the perspective of the child. Superficially a warm, cosy domestic scene, the
child, although sheltered from the truth, knows something is wrong and sees
tears wherever she looks: ‘the child is
watching the teakettle’s small hard tears dance like mad on the hot black
stove.’
In all her poems Bishop maintains a slight
distance from the material, the complete opposite of Sylvia Plath’s approach.
While there is a little autobiography in her work she mostly acts as an
objective observer. Colm Tóibín said of her: ‘She began with the idea that little is known and that much is puzzling’
which suggests she was like a scientist in her approach, always open to
learning something new. Overall her poems on the Leaving Cert course offer
students a great opportunity for deep insight and huge enjoyment.
