The Complete Poems 1927-1979

"I came to Elizabeth Bishop quite late, when I came back to Northern Ireland in my early 30s. I love her painterly eye and I love the distance she imposes on the self. She’s kind of a quiet poet and I think her language is intensely beautiful. The poem ‘The Bite’ is one of those ones where she’s describing the landscape of southern Florida. It’s almost as if she’s gone down to this inlet and set up an easel and painted a picture in words about what is in front of her. She is absolutely true to observed experience and she’s extremely wary of the grand rhetorical gesture, very wary of something that can be construed as public or political poetry. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter That meticulousness of attention is something I feel I could really learn a lot from. In her amazing poem ‘The Map’ you don’t come away from that thinking you know the function of a map any better. In fact you come away thinking you know the function of a map a lot less because it’s all been turned up in the air and made strange. She’s a brilliant travel writer but I am drawn to her because of her dedicated craftsmanship. For example, she could take ten years to write a poem. She did 16 drafts of one poem. I’m so drawn to that methodical approach, making sure it’s right before it’s published. Yes, I’m quite methodical but it’s probably because I’ve been reading Elizabeth Bishop! When I write I’m often more inspired by other poems than direct experience. I think, how would I do that? I don’t think content is that important: I think how you say things is much more interesting. I was reading a lot of Sylvia Plath when I was a teenager, as a lot of female teenagers are, but I think it’s a pretty poisonous influence, in lots of ways. I think she’s brilliant but she’s inimitable. She uses such an inflated emotional landscape, such supreme black despair. I think it was possibly authentic to her but it certainly wasn’t authentic to me and not as a teenager, and I found I had to invent tragedies – tragedy became the dominant point of mode, and I think that’s very dangerous. That’s why I love Elizabeth Bishop. It’s so much broader than that: the whole world in its wonderful variety can come in instead. I would never have written a landscape poem as a teenager; it wouldn’t have occurred to me."