Wallace Stevens, in The Necessary Angel, gave it as his opinion that the purpose of poetry is to help people live their lives. Those of us who have made a study of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems would agree, I think, that they have helped a great many people live their lives. Yet, as David Kalstone remarked, Elizabeth Bishop has always been difficult to ‘place’. She found self-placement, both geographical and psychological, so difficult herself that we find two questions buried in most of her work: ‘Who I am?’ and ‘Where do I belong?’. I would like to suggest in this essay that Bishop did finally decide who she was and where she belonged. Like her own Prodigal, she made up her mind reluctantly, both before and after she went to live in Brazil, to go home to Nova Scotia. She could not live there, of course, since Nova Scotia was the landscape of the childhood that nourished her imagination; nor was that childhood an easy one to return to. But she knew she belonged in Great Village once she began to help herself to live her life by writing about it.
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Anne Stevenson and John Haynes
Of Science Poems edited by David Morley and Andy Brown (Tonbridge: Worpole Press, 2001) ISBN 0 9530947 4 X paperback £6.00
Omm Sety by John Greening (Shoestring Press, 2001) ISBN 1 899549 51 X £5.95
Marvellous Makers
Terrible Destroyers
Ruth O'Callaghan and Anne Stevenson
Anne Stevenson interviewed by Ruth O’Callaghan
Richard Poole, Anne Stevenson, Barry Cole, and Linda Kemp
The Three Wise Monkeys RICHARD POOLE
Who’s Joking with the Photographer? ANNE STEVENSON
Samuel Locke of Boston BARRY COLE
Enchantment of Mina Loy LINDA KEMP
Catherine Byron, Adrian Caesar, Philip Callow, Barry Cole, George Dandoulakis, Angela Leighton, Clare MacDonald Shaw, John Mole, Tom Paulin, Peter Porter, Philip Ramp, Arnold Rattenbury, Maurice Rutherford, William Scammell, Matt Simpson, Mahendra Solanki, Anne Stevenson, Tim Thorne, John Tranter, Dimitris Tsaloumas, Gael Turnbull, and Hugh Underhill
St Thomas Aquinas in MacNeice’s House, September 23rd, 1957
In an Australian Garden
Red Wine and Yellow Sun
For a Cornet Player, Retired
The Altar of the Motherland (trans.: Andreas Kalvos)
Looking at Pictures
Street Flowers
Fats
Oxford
The Puppy of Heaven
The Island Market
More Friggers for John: 22: Convict Tokens 1815-1840; 23: Trench Art 1914-1918
Only Connect
Self Improvement
Taking the Hexameter a Walk – a letter to John Lucas
From ‘The Riverside’
A Ballad for Apothecaries, Being a Poem to Honour the Memory of Nicholas Culpeper, Gent …
The Aisles
Sails
Aegina
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