While many critics have noted ways in which Bishop writes indirectly and obliquely about war, it should also be noted that when her first volume, North & South, appeared in 1946, Louise Bogan, reviewing the book in The New Yorker, had no difficulty registering the presence of war in Bishop’s poetry, declaring that it “contains all manner of references to war and warriors.” Life-long readers of Bishop understand how the profound, insinuative workings of her layered language allows them at times to focus on how she was able to keep war at a distance, while also opening her poetic consciousness to its inexorable

presence. She lived and wrote both inside and outside the camp. With the end of WW II and the coming of the Atomic Age, a new note of apocalyptic threat emerges in Bishop’s poetry. Her Cold War poetry reflects the sense that no one is any longer a “civilian.”