Some sections from John Banville's dazzling "Ghosts":

"How courtly we were, how correctly we counted ourselves. I think that even if she had been fifty years younger there would have been no more between us than there was. And yet I belive there was much. Does that make sense? There are certain people who seem to know me better that I know myself. To some, I realise, this would be an uncomfrtable intrusion on their privacy and their sense of themslves, and it is true, there were occasions when in her presence I was concoius of the pressure upon me of the sagging and unmanageable weight of all she must have know about me and did not say; mostly, though, I felt, well, lightened, somehow, as if I had been given the permission to set down for a moment my burden - the burden of myself, that is - and stand breathing, unrequired breifly, in some calm, wide place."

"Let us take the hypothetical case of a man suprised by love, not for a living woman - he has never been able to care much for the living - but for the figure of a woman in, oh, a painting, let's say. That is, he is swept off his feet one day by a work of art. It happens; not very often, I grant you, but it does happen. The fact that the subject is a female is perhaps not of such significance., although it should be perfectly possible to "fall in love", as they like to put it, with a painted image; after all, what is it lovers ever love but the images they have of each other? Freud himself remarked that in the passionate encounter of every couple there are four people involved. Or should it be six? - the two so-called real lovers, plus the images they have of themselves, plus the images they have of each other. What a tangled web Eros weaves!"

And this absolutely perfect impressionistic word-painting from the opening pages of "The Sea":

"Later that day, the day the Graces came, or the following one, or the one following that, I saw the black car again, recognised it at once as it went bounding over the little humpbacked bridge that spanned the railway line. It is still there, that bridge, just beyond the station. Yes, things endure, while the living lapse. The car was heading out of the village in the direction of the town, I shall call it Ballymore, a dozen miles away. The town is Ballymore, this village is Ballyless, ridiculously, perhaps, but I do not care. The man with the beard who had winked at me was at the wheel, saying something and laughing, his head thrown back. Beside him a woman sat with an elbow out of the rolled-down window, her head back too, pale hair shaking in the gusts from the window, but she was not laughing only smiling, that smile she reserved for him, sceptical, tolerant, languidly amused. She wore a white blouse and sunglasses with white plastic rims and was smoking a cigarette. Where am I, lurking in what place of vantage? I do not see myself. They were gone in a moment, the car's sashaying back-end scooting around a bend in the road with a spurt of exhaust smoke. Tall grasses in the ditch, blond like the woman's hair, shivered briefly and returned to their former dreaming stillness."

Banville is the latest writer I am raving about these days, to folks in my shouting distance. Why? Because Banville says such things that most of us, the unspeaking, walk around wishing to say, to express, but never succeed in doing.

...

Last night I and my friend C went to a talk given by Alice Quinn on Elizabeth Bishop's unfinished drafts & fragments, which she had unearthed from Bishop's archive. Apart from the early signs of genius (as evident from the juvenelia), what really came home to me was how infinitely patient (even thought it could be, and has been, termed obsessive) Ms. Bishop was in getting her poems aloft. Paraphrasing what she wrote in her journals: prose is land transportation, music is sea transportation, and poetry is air transportatation. What a poem seeks to do is take the heavy stuff of life, and push it into flight. Many poems, however, simply keep flapping their wings, and fail to get off the ground. Others, even if they take off, merely hover in the air for a short period, then come crashing down; the landscape is thus littered with many stranded poems.

Ms. Bishop's years of precise re-work and percolation, on the other hand, have put her poems such as "One Art", "Sandpiper", "Fishhouses", "Villanelle" etc into the perpetual orbit of English poetry. Finally, if you enjoy Bishop's poetry, you might enjoy reading the TLS essay, "Elizabeth Bishop's hard-earned mastery" by Adam Krisch on these unfinished drafts and fragments, and on this book, "Edgar Allan Poe and The Jukebox".