Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts,
and Fragments
Elizabeth Bishop, Ed. Alice Quinn
Farrar, Straus And Giroux, 2006.
Reviewed by Jane Hoogestraat
Professor of English
Elizabeth Bishop ranks as one of the most important twentieth century poets, despite having published only a few more than a hundred poems in her lifetime. Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box adds a considerable number of poems from Bishop’s unpublished work, including the haunting lines from the title poem:
Easily through the darkened room
the juke-box burns; the music falls.
Starlight, La Conga, all the dance-halls
in the block of honkey-tonks,
cavities in our waning moon,
strung with bottles and blue lights
and silvered coconuts and conches.
This edition deepens our understanding of Bishop’s biography and of her poetic process, including (for example) sixteen drafts of the villanelle “One Art.” An early draft begins with the prosaic “Mostly, one begins by ‘mislaying’: / keys, reading-glasses, fountain pens / - these are almost too easy to be mentioned,” lines that appear in the finished version as: “Lose something every day. Accept the fluster / of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. / The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” Bishop’s poems, always formal and polished, contain equal measures of lightness and sadness. These qualities are apparent even in drafts that she rejected, and in a poem like “Verdigris,” that the New Yorker rejected in 1950:
Oh blue-green Seas of Greece, and in between,
the olive-groves and copper roofs of Rome!
The catalogues will tell you that they mean
the time to watch for is when Time grows green.