Decorum vs. terror.(Edgar Allan Poe and The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments)(The Complete Poems 1927-1979)(Book review)

Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, by Elizabeth Bishop (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 392 pp., $30)

The Complete Poems 1927-1979, by Elizabeth Bishop (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 287 pp., $15)

THE controversy surrounding the appearance of the new Elizabeth Bishop volume is easily disposed of. Certainly, the poet herself would have been mortified by its publication: drafts, fragments, things that might have been worked up into finished poems. Her craftsmanship meticulous, it often took her years to complete a poem. But yes, we are very glad to have the new book, as we would be for anything like it from a great poet. In fact the new volume contains only a single "uncollected poem"--a finished poem, that is--and it's about the shelter she found in the great love of her life, the Brazilian woman Lota de Macedo Soares. (It does not appear in The Complete Poems 1927-1979--which is, by the way, the best $15 you will ever spend.) An excerpt:

 
   It is marvelous to wake up together 
   At the same minute; marvelous to hear 
   The rain begin suddenly all over the 
   roof, 
   To feel the air suddenly clear 
   As if electricity had passed through it 
   From a black mesh of wires in the sky. 
   All over the roof the rain hisses, 
   And below, the light falling of 
   kisses.... 
   And we imagine dreamily 
   How the whole house caught in a 
   birdcage of lightning 
   Would be quite delightful rather than 
   frightening. 

This fine poem remained unpublished until now, probably because of its lesbian subject, though it is of universal application. In Lota, Bishop found (temporary) safety from some very large matters. Her father died when she was an infant; her mother was confined to an insane asylum when she was four and she lived with relatives; while she was at Vassar her boyfriend committed suicide when she refused to marry him, and sent her a postcard that said, "Go to hell Elizabeth." She became an alcoholic and for 18 years an expatriate in Brazil, where she met Lota--who later killed herself by overdosing on tranquilizers in Bishop's apartment. As the poet James Merrill observed, Bishop spent her life impersonating an ordinary woman. Her ...