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World Poets: Elizabeth Bishop

Any poet who loved geography at school and named George Herbert as a mentor is likely to be strong on place and crystal clarity. Elizabeth Bishop is electrifying at both, her poetry steeped in a glinting charisma of visionary narrative born of real journeys. 

Bishop’s Questions of Travel is one of the best books of foreign adventure poems you could hope to travel in. She knew the meaning of travel and the flair for life it needs. Taken ill in Brazil during a sea-voyage, she fell in love with a Brazilian architect, Lota de Macedo Soares, and lived with her for 16 years. Their love story is told in the Brazilian film Reaching for the Moon and in the book The More I Owe You by the American writer Michael Sledge.

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Massachusetts in 1911 into an endlessly bewildering childhood. Her first vocation was as a composer, the next as a doctor, and finally as a poet. Robert Lowell has praised ‘her tone’, which, he said ‘can be Venetian gorgeous or Quaker simple’ and her ‘abundance of description’ which ‘reminds one of the Russian novelists’. ‘In all matters of form: meter, rhythm, diction, timing, shaping, etc’ he said ‘she is a master’. She painted, too.

Dates and times
6:30 pm | Thu 19 Apr 2018
Where
Sladers Yard
West Bay Road, West Bay
Bridport
Dorset
DT6 4EL
South West
Pricing
£10, with informal buffet dinner afterwards £25