Paulin on Bishop
Tom Paulin is well-known for championing Elisabeth Bishop’s work. Here he reviews the Collected Poems for The Times. He also introduces the book, so maybe this is part of the introduction; it certainly reads like that, though it doesn’t say so. Nowhere else will you see a mainstream review given the two-line summary: Bishop shares a central theme that I would call dwelling-in-the-world or ontological anxiety. A literary editor would not have let that one into a normal review.
Curiously, even though he’s a professor of English, Paulin’s review seems to concentrate on biographical fact (Lowell proposed to her!), guarantees of worth from more famous poets and vague summary: Bishop’s is a poetry of intense visual and vocal power, where the rhythm, rhyme, spoken inflection and carefully composed images have both spontaneity and deft authority. A sample poem - The Bight - is provided on a second page. It doesn’t convince me. It is an uncomfortable mix of wordy affectation and sentimentality dressed up as observation.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Thrill Power Overload
- Thanks (be given) to Tom Paulin
- Newsnight Review again
- Poor old Tom My Irish correspondent has been te…
- Coetzee gets Wood
