Bishop was born in Massachusetts in 1911, but after her father’s death, that same year, she was taken to her mother’s family in Nova Scotia—only to be returned (“unconsulted”) to Massachusetts in 1918, after her mother, whom she never saw again, suffered an irreversible breakdown. “At the Fishhouses” finds Bishop revisiting a spot in Nova Scotia redolent with early memories: “​Although it is a cold evening, ​/ ​down by one of the fishhouses / an old man sits netting, ​/ ​his net, in the gloaming almost invisible . . .”