Riffs on Reading

Have picked up One Art, one of the books I swim in again and again – collected letters of Elizabeth Bishop, skillfully edited by Robert Giroux. Picked it up this time in order to find a few specific Herbert poems that were favourites of hers. I'd been reading Herbert and wanted to see if any of my favourites matched hers. The games we play, huh? She mentions "Love Unknown", which is wonderful. Then try reading Bishop's "The Monument" or "One Art" after that and see the affinities.

Then I took out Bishop's collected and swam in that for a while. "Arrival at Santos" is still my favourite. Has been since 1981. From the opening, "Here is a coast; here is a harbor./Here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery:" to the close, "...either because the glue here is very inferior/or because of the heat. We leave Santos at once;/we are driving to the interior." Perfect. Yes, yes I know that's what everybody says about EB. I agree with everybody.

I imagine Seamus Heaney was dead chuffed (as they say here!) when EB's letters were published and she mentions that he's at Harvard and that she thinks his work is very good.

While I'm at it, I'll recommend a poem of Glyn Maxwell's in the latest issue of Poetry Review (you can find it online at their site, click on link). It's called "Flags and Candles".Very thoughtful, careful, clever poem. When I heard Glyn read a few years ago at Poetry Now in Dun Laoighaire, Seamus Heaney was sitting in front of me and nodding his head a lot, clearly enjoying Glyn's reading. So a line of nods down the years here: Bishop to Heaney to Maxwell... (Heaney's white hair was so fluffy and so copious, it took quite a bit of restraint on my part not to muss it up from behind!)

And more connections: the Poetry Now festival, last weekend of this month, features Alice Quinn, poetry editor of the New Yorker, speaking on the newly found poems of Elizabeth Bishop. Enough riffs.