Vital Memory

Continuing the focus on the work of Elizabeth Bishop, in his biography LOVE UNKNOWN Thomas Travisano brings out how an experience long past becomes the subject of a poem by Bishop appearing generations later. "In the Waiting Room," published in GEOGRAPHY III asserts:

                                       The waiting room was bright
                                        and too hot.  It was sliding
                                        beneath a big black wave,
                                        another, and another.

                                       Then I was back in it.
                                       The War was on.  Outside,
                                       in Worcester, Massachusetts,
                                       were night and slush and cold,
                                       and it was still the fifth
                                       of February, 1918.

​                                       Elizabeth Bishop