Surreal Seas and Embodied Encounters: Elizabeth Bishop’s Darwinian Poetics

At the beginning of Elizabeth Bishop’s prose poem “Strayed Crab,” from her collection Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics (1969), the crustaceous speaker observes that they are not at home asking, “How did I get so far from water?” (Bishop 2011, 163). This chapter examines how Bishop bridges the gap noted by her crab speaker, taking the reader back to the water both through her interconnective meditations on the lives of three nonhuman seaside dwellers and, most crucially, via her sense of our Darwinian genealogical connection to them. I explore the ways in which the ocean is a conspicuous presence in Bishop’s work where her sea-infused writing brings readers closer to the water through a series of nonhuman encounters.