Top 6 - Elizabeth Bishop

One bad habit I must get out of soon is reviewing books before I've finished them or writing pieces before I know the whole story. If the second half of Muldoon's lectures are better than the first then the review below will have to be re-written but I might run out of the vocabulary of admiration if it is.

But it's not often that one is reading two such fine books in tandem, that and Elizabeth Bishop's Complete Poems and then, today, a Sean O'Brien book turns up as well.

I had always known, by the quality of her admirers, that Elizabeth Bishop was 'any good' but it hadn't quite clicked with me until I made the determined attempt to find out what it was about her. However, being parsimonious, I was going to make sure that buying her Complete wasn't going to be a waste of money.

She is well worth the effort, ticks all the right boxes and I'm sure that when I've read more of the book the Top 6 might be different to this selection. It's even possible that when the dust settles, she will find a place in my Top 10 poets and it is always useful to be genuinely able to include another woman at the top of one's charts because nominating 10 men makes one wonder if one does lack all the necessary cross gender empathy. It isn't an issue for me but one can hear the shrill accusations from some parts of the poetry world. But, don't worry. Good poetry is simply that for me, and LizBish will take her place in my pantheon on the merit of her poems.

A good villanelle is hard to find. There are several but One Art takes inevitably high order in any shortlist. Clever, emotional and playing with the difficult form, it is a tremendous poem. In fact the volume Geography III marks an obvious high point in her career, including as it does Crusoe in England, Poem ('About the size of an old dollar bill') and The End of March. The great thing about Bishop, and the job of the proper critic is to say, how her gentle, distanced, self-deprecating tone is so powerful. And yet she shows herself to be a great technician, too, in the villanelle and Sestina, which is very much the sort of poem that I, for one, would love to be able to achieve successfully. Insomnia is another I can't possibly leave out at this stage and I realize I have left out a few of her best known poems and might have to revise this selection later.

But I honestly didn't think she was going to be this good. We should trust in trusted authorities when they point us in the right direction and I have a feeling that, as with my other favourite poets, she is likely to get better the more I read her. This is beautifully made, subtle work likely to reward re-reading rather than fade after an initial impressive effect. She is certainly an example of the apprentice going on to outdo the mentor, in this case Marianne Moore. It's quite possible that she only wrote masterpieces and you can't say that about many poets. Derek Mahon might be one but we will see about that because he might be my next subject.

First impressions do count for a lot but sometimes the flash of early infatuation can wear off. On the other hand, you sometimes know it isn't going to. I think Elizabeth Bishop might not find it difficult to stay in the elite group of C20th poets .