Books: The Passing Strange

QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL by Elizabeth Bishop. 95 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $3.95.

“And some there are who wander the world looking for what is like unto themselves,” old André Gide once mused. “But there are others, and I am one of these, who seek above all strangeness in things.” Poet Elizabeth Bishop is another one of these. For more than 30 years, she has wandered the five continents in search of the intractable, in search of a beauty unbefriending and the poetry of the passing strange. Travel is her profession, and her art is the art of snapshot. Her poems are bright slides that commemorate in gloating color and big-pored detail the places she went, the things she saw, the tiny epiphanies of passage. They are very few and very fine. In Poems: North and South—A Cold Spring (1954), her volume of collected verse, there are only 48 poems, but they include some of the finest descriptive poetry produced since World War II.

In Questions of Travel there are only 20 poems, but six of them are egregiously good. One is a 30-page prose poem that contains this spectacular child’s-eye view of a horse being shod: “He is enormous. His rump is a brown, glossy world. His ears are secret entrances to the underworld. One of his legs is doubled up behind him in an improbable affectedly polite way. Clear bright-green bits of stiffened froth, like glass, are stuck around his mouth . . and the cloud of his odor is a chariot in itself.”

Most of the best poems in the book describe Brazil, where Poet Bishop has kept a pied à terre since 1952, and describe it in images that blazon the retina long after the book is closed. In “The Armadillo,” for instance, she pictures the “frail, illegal fire balloons” that during Holy Week float up from Brazilian villages into the starry darkness, where they “flare and falter, wobble and toss” like fiery little moons in a mist.

. . . the paper chambers flush and fill

with light

that comes and goes, like hearts . . .

Last night another big one fell.

It splattered like an egg of fire

against the cliff behind the house.

The flame ran down. We saw the pair

of owls who nest there flying up

and up, their whirling black-and-white

stained bright pink underneath, until

they shrieked up out of sight.