Poems

Sometimes a book sits on your shelf for years before you find the key to open it. I've grown more interested in Bishop as I've learned more about her over the years, but it was only Toíbín's friendly and sensitive introduction that led me finally to open her poems (recently collected in this revised edition). I would read a chapter of his book, and then read a poem or two in hers. Her poems aren't dense thickets—they are clean, concrete, and declarative—but Toíbín doesn't exhaust their meaning, or try to. He pries open a point of entry and leaves the poems, little worlds in themselves, as places for another reader to walk around in.