Reading [Bishop's] The Complete Poems, where scarcely a poem is without its sea and travel image—coast, harbor, map, road—one is not long deceived by the maps and travel books, the fish and seabirds. This poet's role is not Haklyut nor Audubon, but Magellan, Henry the Navigator, the spirit of Clark accepting Lewis's invitation: "This is an amence undertaking fraited with numerous difficulties" and characterized by an irresistible enthusiasm not for lands untrod by foot, but for places—knowledge—heretofore unreached by the imagination. The paraphernalia of the navigator-explorer comes to mean the conscious explorer-discoverer beyond the realm of ordinary experience, even the sympathetic prodigal with his "shuddering insights." The folly of experience for experience's sake is debated in "Questions of Travel." But is there experience beyond The Experience? Does not the prodigal really know more? (p. 44)

The explorer is willing to lose all—ship and life ("the end of travel")—for enlarged experience. "We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship."… There is to be no safe harbor, no stopping place. The clearest statements of this significance are in "Questions of Travel," "Over 2000 Illustrations" and "At the Fishhouses."…

"Questions of Travel," one of Miss Bishop's finest poems, ends: Should we have stayed at home, / wherever that may be?" This poem takes the form of a meditation on the human need for travel and exploration…. How much do we need to know? All that we can know.

"Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance" (another fine poem that deserves an essay in itself) seems the essence of Bishop. "Thus should have been our travels: / serious, engravable," it begins falsely. But all that is transitory, flowing and flown, uncapturable, is the stuff that's precious. The images given impart a joie de vivre delightful and characteristic of Bishop's work. Even fright, that inescapable part of being alive, is cherished. In the final stanza the lines "Why couldn't we have seen / this old Nativity while we were at it?" shifts the perspective to the travels of mankind, history, to what human beings see and come to. Would we have observed the Nativity merely as "a family with pets"? (p. 45)

As the explorer travels with the best, most economically allotted provisions and can continue to go forward almost without provisions and rise to brilliancies of physical performance and inventive contrivance, so Bishop's style and vocabulary seem to be the most practical and economical, the most even-paced and carefully planned, yet equipped to rise to astonishing inventive performance as required by her subject. This note says nothing of the many poetic forms also explored with great skill in these poems, does not attempt to treat her wonderful art of language—both factors in the importance of these poems. It says nothing of several masterpieces such as "Sestina" and "Visits to St. Elizabeths"; they are the vistas of the undiscoverable—almost mystical in their reach—that fall outside the narrow text I have taken. Nor does it take into account the poems printed since the publication of The Complete Poems in 1969. I do not have them at hand, but my feeling as I read them in magazines was that they are of a mastery perhaps even beyond these. The new book, Geography III, will be a real event in poetry, for these poems are an important fact in our literary history. (pp. 45-6)