the "awful but cheerful" activities of the world include the acts by which man domesticates his surroundings, even if those surroundings are purely mechanical, like the filing station or the truck in Brazil painted with "throbbing rosebuds".The definition of life in the conversion of the strange to the familial, of the unexplored to the knowable, of the alien to the beloved.No domesticity is entirely safe. As in the midst of life we are in death, so , in Bishop's poetry, in the midst of the familiar, and most especially there, we feel the familiar as the unknowable. "I lost two cities, lovely ones. And vaster,some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent...the art of losing's not too hard to masterthough it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.""A moose has come out of/ the i...