Fish House

In Nova Scotia, small huts for tackle and fishing boats are still common in outport communities.

Elizabeth Bishop’s At The Fish Houses uses such a location to describe a specific way of life revolving around fishing, and at the end of the poem she writes about the more elemental aspects of water as a metaphor for knowledge.

She describes how we… imagine knowlege,…dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free……and goes onto write that it comes from… the cold hard mouth of the world…