Jesse Zuba, Review of Cassandra Laity’s “Eco-Geologies of Queer Desire: Elizabeth Bishop’s Love Poetry and Charles Darwin’s Beagle Geology Travel Narratives.”

摘要

Responding to recent calls to make more room for the study of materiality in feministscholarship, Cassandra Laity reads Elizabeth Bishop as a poet whose work enmeshesqueer intimacy in geological history. Her evidence is two love poems from later inBishop’s career – “Crusoe in England” and “Vague Poem” – which she interprets in thecontext of Bishop’s reading of Charles Darwin’s Diary and Voyage of the Beagle. Byarticulating “Eco-Geologies of Queer Desire”, Bishop offers a “richly materialized”vision both of her lovers’ bodies and of the planetary history in which they areembedded (430). In so doing, Bishop shows the interdependence of human life and thenatural world and thus challenges the “neglectful patriarchal anthropos currentlyscarring our planet” (429).