Jorie Graham on Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses"

"It is also a visionary work, showing how a solitary soul might descend into the heart of life, of matter, and achieve solace and spiritual insight, however momentary. And it confirmed the ascent of a rare new voice: a voice modulating between melancholy and wit, quizzical, even skeptical, yet possessed of a sacramental sensibility; a companionable, piercing voice, exploratory, but without need for ideology or belief system-a mesmerizing voice that became indispensable to American verse."

"Bishop was born in Massachusetts in 1911, but after her father's death, that same year, she was taken to her mother's family in Nova Scotia-only to be returned ("unconsulted") to Massachusetts in 1918, after her mother, whom she never saw again, suffered an irreversible breakdown. "At the Fishhouses" finds Bishop revisiting a spot in Nova Scotia redolent with early memories: "Although it is a cold evening, / down by one of the fishhouses / an old man sits netting, / his net, in the gloaming almost invisible . . .""

Elizabeth Bishop cultivated a distinctive voice that blended colloquial diction with visionary, sacramental perception. The poem 'At the Fishhouses' moves from modernist austerity toward a more personal, conversational vernacular while achieving luminous, momentary spiritual insight. Bishop's work navigates melancholy, wit, skepticism, and compassion without reliance on ideology. She produced a small, meticulously revised body of poems and spent much of her adult life in Brazil. Deep attachments to editors provided encouragement and a stable publication home. Early losses and displacement shaped memory and imagery, and the poem revisits Nova Scotia scenes infused with early recollections and attentive observation.

Read at The New Yorker