9 June 2025

June, the days still grow longer, for a bit. In the Place St Sulpice the antiques market will soon yield the space to the poetry market. I’ve been reading a lovely small book by Colm Toibin about Elizabeth Bishop. I actually finished it 2 or 3 weeks ago, and then began over. It makes it own special contribution to EB literature in its lovely clear simple prose. The chapter I read a couple days ago was about Bishop poem called ‘The Armadillo,’ and another poem not published in her lifetime with a line about touching the tip of a lightning rod on a steeple. I can’t find that line again, but my thought was, I think, about Marianne Moore’s Steeple poem and how I was sitting in my Ikea rocker looking across the street at the lightning rod on the church, and back to a year or so when I was walking past the back of the church, ‘the holy end’ as Larkin calls it, and lightning struck the rod and made a very scary boom.

I think I’ll take Toibin’s book On Elizabeth Bishop (2015, Princeton UP) back to the Bay Area with me. We fly early tomorrow morning.