Bishop, Elizabeth. Questions of Travel. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1965. Print.

Contents:

Questions of Travel is Elizabeth Bishop’s collection of poetry dedicated to her friend and partner Lota de Macedo Soares. Although Soares met an unfortunate end that caused Bishop a large amount of grief, their time together was happy and full of love, if offset by their surrounding political environment.

The book is split into two parts, the first, Brazil, beginning with their “Arrival at Santos,” detailing the little town, with its little church and warehouses. The poem is apt for the beginning of the book because it gives us a look at where the subjects are located while also providing us with a smatter of emotion, such as the “immodest demands for a different world” or “Finish your breakfast/ The tender is running” or “I somehow never thought of there being a flag.” The lattermost quote, the end of the second to last stanza, marks the subjects’ final destination as a very real place.

The poems included in this work are:

• I. Brazil

  • “Arrival at Santos”*

  • “Brazil, January 1, 1502”

  • Questions of Travel”

  • Squatter’s Children”

  • “Manuelzinho”

  • “Electrical Storm”

  • “Song for the Rainy Season”

  • “The Armadillo”

  • “The Riverman”

  • “Twelfth Morning; or What You Will”*

  • “The Burglar of Babylon” - published in its own volume in 1968

• II. Elsewhere

  • “In the Village”

  • “Manners”

  • “Sestina”

  • “First Death in Nova Scotia”

  • “Filling Station”

  • “Sunday, 4AM”

  • “Sandpiper”

  • “From Trollope’s Journal”*

  • “Visits to St. Elizabeths”*

Previous Publication:

All works in this publication were originally printed in The New Yorker except for

• “Twelfth Morning; or What You Will” - originally printed in The New York Review of Books

• “From Trollope’s Journal”

• “Visits to St. Elizabeths” - appeared in Partisan Review

• “Arrival at Santos” - appeared in Poems: North & South--A Cold Spring

Published at the same time by Ambassador Books, Ltd. in Toronto, Canada

Critical Reaction:

“The title poem, "Questions of Travel," was first published in 1956, about four years after Elizabeth had taken up residence in Brazil. The tourist has now become the passionate observer and, in a sense, has lost her innocence….Elizabeth’s poems have more the "feel" of life in Brazil than anything else written by a North American because they undercut the large generalizations that we all have when we approach a subject on this scale.”

Brown, Ashley. “Elizabeth Bishop In Brazil.” Southern Review. 1977.

“The extreme process of self-definition, for Bishop, is the provisional and momentary act of writing and self-revelation. The poem becomes an interiorized debate – the two voices are less separate characterizations than they are a compound self that interrogates itself and reveals, not affirmation, but doubt. Despite the seemingly multitudinous range of experience and possibility, Bishop asserts "the choice is never wide and never free," because we are governed by experience and language.”

McCorkle, James. "Concordances and Travels: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop.” The Still Performance: Writing, Self and Interconnection in Five Postmodern American Poets. Charlottesville: 1989. University of Virginia Press.