`In Worcester, Massachusetts': Essays on Elizabeth Bishop. From the 1997 Elizabeth Bishop Conference at WPI.

`In Worcester, Massachusetts': Essays on Elizabeth Bishop. From the 1997 Elizabeth Bishop Conference at WPI. Ed. by Laura Jehn Menides and Angela G. Dorenkamp. (WPI Studies, 18) New York, Bern, and Frankfurt a.M.: Lang. 1999. xi + 361 pp. 22 [pounds sterling]; $35.95.

This collection of thirty-seven short papers from the conference at Elizabeth Bishop's birthplace addresses a variety of issues current in Bishop studies, including her connection to Worcester and the other places of her troubled early years which generated her anxiety-ridden re-imaginings of childhood, and her lifelong search for somewhere to call home. Thomas Travisano, in `Elizabeth Bishop and the Origin of Childhood Studies' (pp. 5-19), argues that Bishop's `ongoing four-way conversation' with fellow poets Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman, created a new aesthetic of childhood as cultural subject. Travisano reviews the events of Bishop's early childhood, especially the traumatic removal when she was five from her maternal grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia to her wealthier paternal grandparents in Worcester, an event that Bishop, as an adult, described as having almost killed her. He relates Bishop's sense of a lost paradise (the removal from Great Village being the earliest and most acute form) to a number of her poems, including the recently discovered comic poem, `Ballad of the Subway Train', written when she was sixteen. Other essays on childhood are Barbara Page's `Bishop as Poet of Childhood Recollected' (pp. 21-34), and Gail H. Dayton's critique of the autobiographical memoir in prose, `The Country Mouse' (pp. 35-41).

Another section focuses upon `Worcester and Elsewhere', primarily essays about Brazil, exile and migration, that fill in some interesting biographical detail on familiar topics. Carmen L. Oliveira's `Luminous Lota' (pp. 83-91) and George Monteiro's `Bishop's Brazil and ViceVersa' (pp. 93-98) have sympathetic perspectives on Lota de Macedo Soares with whom Bishop lived for thirteen years at Petropolis. Essays in this section also draw on the paradise theme, including Harriet Y. Cooper's `Elizabeth Bishop: Longing for Home--And Paradise' (pp. 119-28).

The section of five essays on translation has three essays on Bishop's own translations, and two on translating her work into Japanese. The section on Bishop's relationship to other writers has a diverse net ranging from the expected names of George Herbert and Wordsworth (the latter again in pursuit of the childhood theme), to Jorie Graham and other contemporary women poets in James McCorkle's essay `Elizabeth Bishop's Embracing Gaze' (pp. 259-70). Students would be happy to light upon the section entitled `Images and Insights: Close Readings' which includes Joelle Biele on `The End of March' (pp. 129-38) and Lorrie Goldensohn's insightful essay illustrated with some of Bishop's watercolors, `Elizabeth Bishop's Written Pictures, Painted Poems' (pp. 167-76).

`Imperialism, Politics, Racism' is a short section, but confirms that postcolonialism is currently a productive, if problematic field in Bishop studies. Steven Gould Axelrod wastes no time in posing the question: `Was Elizabeth Bishop a Racist?' (pp. 345-56), focusing, not on the Brazilian poems, but upon racial identity in two early poems, `Cootchie' and `Songs for a Colored Singer'. He finds the former a 'naive discourse' guilty of `peeking out' from a `cocoon of whiteness'. Renee R. Curry's `Elizabeth Bishop: At Home with Whiteness' (pp. 337-44) reads `The Imaginary Iceberg' as a `blatant display of white racial dominance'. Both critics acknowledge the complexity of Bishop's poetry, but seem surprised that she did not take pains to edit out racist stereotypes. These papers raise interesting issues, but seem so paralysed by their own desire to exhibit correct racial attitudes that they fail to trace the exploratory nature of her imagination: attitudes and shifts of attitudes, after all, were her poetic material. The ground is laid here, however, for further work on this subject.

The essays in this collection would provide students with a useful entry into the Bishop critical community, and it is good to think that Worcester, for all its painful associations for Bishop personally, can also be a place of communal celebration of her life and work.

PAT RIGHELATO
UNIVERSITY OF READING