In this episode, poet Katharine Towers discusses Elizabeth Bishop’s poems ‘Sandpiper’ and ‘Jerónimo’s House’ and her own poem ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Sad Epitaph.’
In the interview, Katharine explains how she went from being a prose writer to a poet in part from reading Elizabeth Bishop’s poems. She examines the qualities of Bishop’s writing through an extended reading of ‘Sandpiper’, focusing in particular on line lengths, repetitions and rhymes. Katharine highlights the three things that Bishop strived for in her work — accuracy, spontaneity and mystery which she goes on to reflect on in both ‘Sandpiper’ and ‘Jerónimo’s House’. With regards to ‘Jeronimo’s House’, Katharine delves into her own interest in solitude when looking at this piece. She considers the idea that Jerónimo’s house is a ‘love nest’: unpicking this notion through various ways of reading this phrase. She explores the idea that Bishop (or her subjects) are often looking for a refuge or somewhere to hide away.
Katharine then goes on to illuminate her own poem ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Sad Epitaph’. She talks about how she was inspired by Bishop’s comment to Robert Lowell about being the loneliest person who ever lived. Katharine sees this work as being a part of a sequence of first-person poems in the voice of various ‘alone’ women – and the ways in which aloneness was important to them. She reflects on the poem’s slant, the language of the work, the perspective (and possible feelings) of the narrator.
There are various editions of Elizabeth Bishop’s Collected Poems – the one I have is Complete Poems (Chatto, 1991). You can read ‘Sandpiper’ here.
As well as the Bishop poems highlighted we also touch on ‘The Moose’, ‘The End of March’, ‘The Bight’ and ‘The Fish’ in our conversation.
Katharine Towers has published three collections with Picador, most recently Oak which was a Poetry Book of the Month in The Guardian. The Floating Man (2010) won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and The Remedies (2016) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book of the Month in The Observer. A fourth collection is forthcoming from Picador in 2026.
A pamphlet ‘let him bring a shrubbe’ exploring the life and work of the twentieth-century English composer Gerald Finzi was published by The Maker’s Press in 2023. In 2019 HappenStance Press published another pamphlet The Violin Forest. You can find out more about Katharine’s books by going to her website.
You can also follow me on X – @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky – @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.
‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Sad Epitaph’ by Katharine Towers
In my fairy palace I am as lonely as I could wish.
The ivy has grown up and over, and cosily inside
there’s just little me reading or sitting.
I could be on the moon or I could be
in a Hans Christian Andersen story
or I could be a girl getting over a love affair.
The first room has two beds, so one will always be empty.
The second room has two chairs, so I can see where I will sit tomorrow.
The third room has two notebooks, so there will always be blank pages.
At night I listen to flamenco on the radio.
As I snap my fingers and click my heels I feel tremendously
Spanish, or I feel a sultry empty weary joy.
Covering the windows are the ivy’s mathematical hands.
Daylight pokes through when it can,
making of the worn-out floorboards a map of bright dots.