Extract

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lost door keys, an hour badly spent, places and names and houses: the poem begins by cataloguing small losses with the composure of someone who has practiced, insisting that none of it is hard to master. Bishop builds her villanelle with the steady hand of a watchmaker, each stanza raising the stakes from the trivial to the continental, from a mother's watch to entire cities, until the final stanza arrives at the loss of a beloved and the form itself begins to crack. The parenthetical command to "Write it!" betrays the grief the poem has spent six stanzas containing. Published in 1976 near the end of Bishop's life, it is the most controlled performance of heartbreak in American poetry, a formal cage built to hold what cannot be held.