Obligingly, the titles of Elizabeth Bishop's volumes of poetry [included in The Complete Poems, 1927–1979]—North and South, Questions of Travel, Geography III—chart the range and nature of her literary world. Geography engrosses her. Fascinated by the foreign, she maps it in poem after poem….

Even when attempting other subjects, Elizabeth Bishop finds it hard to tear herself entirely away from her attachment to the geographical. A poem about queasy thoughts in a dentist's waiting-room soon has its protagonist's eyes 'glued to the cover / of the National Geographic'. In '12 O'Clock News', there is what amounts to an early exercise in the currently modish 'Martian' school of writing, with the implements of the writer's trade seen in terms of topography: her lamp becomes a 'full moon'; the typewriter is an 'escarpment'; sheets of manuscript represent 'a slight landslip' where 'the exposed soil appears to be of poor quality: almost white, calcareous, and shaly'.

Such visual conceits are among Elizabeth Bishop's favourite techniques—used especially often to capture aqueous effects….

Yet, for all its lustrous accuracy of metaphor, Elizabeth Bishop's poetry is eventually dulled by predictability. There is a readiness to rely on the same stylistic tics—particularly repetition. (p. 25)

This mannerism is perhaps symptomatic of a more general penchant for sameness, which limits Elizabeth Bishop's writing. Paradoxically, in view of the author's taste for travel, her poetry ultimately conveys a sense of narrow horizons. Travelogue and topography are virtually fixed features. Outside of this range, she seems uncertain. When treating of people instead of places, for example, the poems are likely to fall into off-putting coyness, punctuated by winsome little cries—'Oh! It has caught Miss Breen's / skirt! There!'—or arch imagery: as when Marianne Moore is conjured up 'with heaven knows how many angels all riding / on the broad black brim of your hat'. It is when confined to the sphere of geography that Elizabeth Bishop shows at her best. Her bulletins from abroad are perhaps as depth-less as a postcard, but they are also as picturesque…. Brightly responding to the earth's surface, Elizabeth Bishop ensures that, if her poetry is superficial, it is sumptuously so. (p. 26)