My first encounter with
Elizabeth Bishop took place in the beginning of July, 2015. Actually I have the
exact date (thanks to Facebook) – it was the fifth of July. I don’t remember
why or how I came across this movie – “Reaching for the Moon”, but it was the
fifth of July when I watched it for the first time.
I’d never heard about
Elizabeth Bishop before that day, and I didn’t know who she was or what
position she occupied in American poetry. And on my first watching the movie I
wasn’t impressed by the Elizabeth Bishop character at all – mostly because Lota
as performed by Gloria Pires sort of filled all the space with her powerful personality
(later I did understand how wonderful Miranda Otto and her performance were).
But the poems from the movie struck me at once. So I started – quite
predictably – with “One Art”. And I knew at once that that was “my” type of
poetry. I liked the poem’s deceptive simplicity which covered deep reflection
on love and loss and all those things. I liked this “ordinary” tone of speaking,
definitely ironical, mixed with true tension. I liked the precise use of every
word. And – most important of all, since this is my almost instinctive reaction
to any text I like – I felt the desire to draw an illustration to this poem,
which I did the next day.
Then it was the “Close,
Close…” poem. Again, I was impressed by how Elizabeth Bishop managed to do it:
simple and deep at once. It’s a love poem with the image of two lovers in bed –
and paradoxically it is not an erotic poem at all. It is about the metaphysics
of love, about something eternal and unchangeable in love. And this quality
somehow emerges not from the words, but from their background. It was amazing –
and of course, I did an illustration
And then it was “In The Waiting Room” – that was
a sort of final proof. It was the third
poem in a row by the same author I liked so much, and I understood that “this
was the beginning of a beautiful friendship”, so to speak. I liked Elizabeth
Bishop’s
interest in ordinary things, the
small
details in this poem, and its “prosy”, narrative structure and tone. I was
impressed with how wonderfully Elizabeth Bishop reflected a specific
child’s perception of the world – in the image of
“different pairs of hands lying under the lamps”.
The little girl was too shy to look at adult strangers’ faces, so she looked at
their hands and saw them as if they were removed from their bodies or as if
they were hollow gloves. I noticed that Elizabeth Bishop’s poems had a lot in
common with poems by the Polish poet
Wislawa Szymborska, and later I wrote an essay on the poetics of loss in their
poetry. And of course, I made an illustration.
Natalia's illustration of "Manners."
Since that time, I have
started reading Elizabeth Bishop every day and have produced an illustration or two every
day. I have read Elizabeth Bishop’s biography, her letters, and some academic
materials about her. Somehow, very fast and in very natural way, Elizabeth
Bishop became an important part of my life. And what was very important for me is
that I’ve had encouragement and support from some people in Elizabeth Bishop’s
world – Jonathan Ellis, Sandra Barry, and John Barnstead.
I’ve learned that there were
a lot of dark moments in Elizabeth Bishop’s life, but what was amazing about
her personality was her ability to meet everything in life with wit and irony. In
her letters she had endless funny stories and anecdotes about this and that. And
in her poems – even in the most serious and dramatic ones – she sort of smiles
or even laughs discreetly, just for herself. She really was “awful but
cheerful”, just as her life was. She was interested in everything – in people,
in places, in things, in life in general. This interest was the driving force of
her writing, and her writing made her a winner
While reading
“Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography” I came across following words
by John Bernard Myers: “I heard her reading at the YMHA. <…> She didn’t
have either a Canadian accent or a New
York accent; it was just a very pure way of speaking”
[157]. I’d say that Elizabeth Bishop had no accent not only in reading her
works, but more importantly in writing her works. She’s speaking not as a
woman, nor as an American or Canadian – she’s speaking as a human being
addressing another human being, and that is, I suppose, the most precious
quality of her work.
*****
Natalia Povalyaeva (b.
1971) is a writer, graphic artist/book illustrator, and a professor of English
Literature in BSU (Belarusian State University,
Minsk, Belarus). She is teaches modern and
contemporary English Literature. She has authored numerous publications on
twentieth-century English women’s prose; among them are Polyphonic prose of
Virginia Woolf (2003) and Jeanette Winterson, or Rebirth of Lying (2006).
She also translated the novel Lighthousekeeping (2006) and several short
stories by Jeanette Winterson into Russian. Currently she has completed a book
on Victorian Music Hall as a setting and a personage
in Neo-Victorian fiction (published in 2014).
Natalia has been drawing since the age of two. She studied at
an art studio under the Belorussian artist Vasily Sumarev and has taken courses
in sculpture and art history. Her pictures have been sold in many countries around the
world, including the USA, France, Germany,
Norway, Finland, and Italy. She is doing a lot of book
illustrations and book cover designs (mostly for Russian publishing houses) and
graphic art in mixed media. Among her works are illustrations to three-part
bestseller “Porebrik iz bordurnogo kamnya” (“Pavement border made of curb
stone” – a comic book on Moscow
– Saint-Petersburg cultural differences by Russian writer Olga Lucas).