In Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop teaches us once again that cartography can, in the right hands, be an exact science. Asking again her inveterate traveler's questions—What is in the East? In the West? In the South? In the North?—she answers them with the same miraculous (though seemingly offhand) clarity, the same order in apparent disorder, the same alchemy which changes, without our noticing, the exterior into the interior landscape. Bishop seems more preoccupied, as she travels that way, with what lies in the West; and, as corollary, with her own past. She seems to be revisiting, as several commentators have noted, the scenes and subjects of her earlier poems—Nova Scotia, the tropics, the New England shore—bringing to them a new intimacy and directness, a domestication which is at the same time a deeper exploration of their significance.

There are three poems in this volume...