Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Moose.” This episode is dedicated to Patricia Dwyer, whose love of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry inspires my own. Nova Scotia. Just the sound of those two words conjures up evocative images for me. I’ve never been there, but I have always wanted to go. Maybe the fact that poet Elizabeth Bishop – born in 1911 and died in 1979 – spent some of her childhood there is part of what draws me to her and her poetry. After all, as so many critics and scholars have observed, Bishop was fairly obsessed with place, with geography. Indeed, one of her volumes of poetry was titled Questions of Travel, another Geography III. Nova Scotia is one of those places that called to Bishop in her poetry – and her poem “The Moose,” set in the Canadian province, is my favorite of Bishop’s poems. I love how Bishop isolates a specific, transformative moment in time – a moose on the macadam in front of a Boston-bound bus late at night. The poem opens with Bishop’s evocation of Nova Scotia: