Obligingly, the titles of Elizabeth Bishop's volumes of poetry [included in The Complete Poems, 1927–1979]—North and South, Questions of Travel, Geography III—chart the range and nature of her literary world. Geography engrosses her. Fascinated by the foreign, she maps it in poem after poem….

Even when attempting other subjects, Elizabeth Bishop finds it hard to tear herself entirely away from her attachment to the geographical. A poem about queasy thoughts in a dentist's waiting-room soon has its protagonist's eyes 'glued to the cover / of the National Geographic'. In '12 O'Clock News', there is what amounts to an early exercise in the currently modish 'Martian' school of writing, with the implements of the writer's trade seen in terms of topography: her lamp becomes a 'full moon'; the typewriter is an 'escarpment'; sheets of manuscript represent 'a slight landslip' where 'the exposed soil appears to be of poor...