First of all, I have no idea how to review a book of poetry.
Not formally anyway, because I don’t know the difference between an iambic pentameter or a dithyramb. I don’t know how to scan. I don’t know what scanning is. I was taught all of that in high school, but forgot immediately because it seemed too much like math. I sort of know what sonnets and haiku are supposed to be, and I used to know what a villanelle was but I forgot that too. I have a rhyming dictionary around here somewhere — poems rhyme, right?
But I do know what I like, and I like — love actually! — the poet Jacqueline Bishop’s collection of poems called Snapshots from Istanbul.
Jacqueline was born in Jamaica and is already the writer of the beautiful novel The River’s Song, a meditation on Caribbean girlhood. She won a Fulbright scholarship and spent a season in Paris(!). Snapshots, a slender and breathtaking book of poetry, was inspired by a trip to Turkey. The poems deal with not only her journeys there, which included a love affair with a man who, as a Kurd, couldn’t possibly marry her, but also her childhood, her family, the ancient poet Ovid’s banishment from Athens and the self-exile of the painter Gaugin. Her language in each poem is lush, gorgeous, precise; they are verses you want to even physically linger in somehow.
“My mother has gone ahead and rearranged my apartment.
A clean, clear scent comes from the bathroom. The shower curtain
is a shimmering, fluorescent blue —
schools of fish swimming about the Atlantic ocean.
An oversized pair of yellow gloves hangs over the lip
of the whiter-than-white; the whitest-it-has-ever-been bathtub.
(“New York, New York”)
What a perfect evocation of a perfectly cleaned bathroom — not only a perfectly cleaned bathroom, but a bathroom cleaned by the poet’s mother! What is more mundane than yellow Playtex gloves over the rim of a bathtub? Yet the imagine lingers in the mind.
Bishop’s Ovid poems, which lament his exile and his betrayal by people he thought were his friends, could maybe have been written by the Roman poet himself.
Oh I repent!
I repent!
Emperor,
I long to come home.
It is cold here —
the wine turns to ice;
when I talk:
an awful gray-blue smoke.
I am out among the barbarians.
I can hear them, even now,
drawing closer and closer .
(“Ovid in Exile”)
The succinct lines remind one of verses found on bits of papyrus. And Bishop’s Istanbul poems makes one want to pick up and fly away to the city.
There are, of course veiled women here,
but not as many as I thought,
and they are not the only ones
The place is bigger than I thought,
packed more tightly than I thought,
much bigger I think, than Manhattan.
Mornings I wake to the call to prayer,
women shaking out dust-cloths from windows,
busying for the day
Taksim Square is just like the Village
in New York; same stores, same music,
people, like ants, always about….
(“Snapshots from Istanbul”)
Jacqueline Bishop, brilliant and still young, is what Anne Sexton called “an only poet.”
