A Shorter Shirazad: 101 Poems of Michael Field, and: Music and Silence: The Gamut of Michael Field, and: The Michael Field Catalogue: A Book of Lists (review)

A Shorter Shirazad: 101 Poems of Michael Field. Chosen, annotated, but not edited by Ivor C. Treby. Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk: De Blackland Press, 1999. 141 pp. $12.00

Music and Silence: The Gamut of Michael Field. Chosen, annotated, but not edited by Ivor C. Treby. Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk: De Blackland Press, 2000. 221 pp. $21.50

The Michael Field Catalogue: A Book of Lists. Researched and assembled by Ivor C. Treby. [London]: De Blackland Press, 1998. 284 pp. $57.50

Despite increasing interest in the poetry of Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), little of it is in print and even less has received critical attention. It appeared originally from small presses in attractive small editions of between twenty-seven and a few hundred copies. Revised editions in America added 100 copies of Long Ago (the same number as in England) and—the largest edition by far—925 of Underneath the Bough, and T. Sturge Moore's brief and often inaccurate A Selection from the Poems of Michael Field appeared in 1925. When the upsurge of interest in women poets, gay and lesbian writing, and literary collaboration brought Michael Field back into view about a decade ago, even the name was unknown to most professional Victorianists. But the work done in essays by Chris White in "'Poets and lovers ever more': Interpreting Female Love in the Poetry and Journals of Michael Field" (1990) and in Angela Leighton's Victorian Women Poets: Writing against the Heart (1992) has been followed by other critics, and the poems themselves have begun to reappear. Sight and Song and Underneath the Bough were reprinted in one volume (now out of print) in 1993, and there are substantial selections in recent collections of nineteenth-century women's poetry (Leighton and Reynolds, Higonnet, Armstrong and Blain) and Victorian anthologies (Collins and Rundle, Mermin and Tucker). Most of Michael Field's work is available online through subscribing libraries in the Chadwyck-Healey databases of English poetry and verse drama, although with only the "revised and decreased" second edition of Underneath the Bough, and without either the small 1930 collection, The Wattlefold, or, more distressingly, Long Ago. Of the more than 900 published poems, however, some appeared only in periodicals, and many poems survive in manuscript but never were published at all.

The first two volumes of Ivor C. Treby's projected three-volume edition of Michael Field's poetry are therefore of major importance. (The third volume, to be called "In Leash to the Stranger: The Unknown Poetry of Michael Field," is planned to incorporate and expand the first two, adding about 100 poems more.) Since Treby's principle "when two poems of equal calibre jostle for inclusion" has been to prefer the one that is unpublished or "throws new light" (Catalogue, p. 280), his selections will vastly expand our knowledge of Michael Field's range and accomplishments. Thirty-three of the poems in the first volume and fifty-two in the second are printed for the first time; eight have appeared only in small periodicals or other out-of-the way places; and fifty-seven come from volumes that have been ignored by anthologists and are almost entirely unfamiliar today. Whereas recent anthologists and critics have been especially interested in the extrapolations from Sappho that comprise Long Ago, the ekphrastic excesses of Sight and Song, and the two most varied and generally attractive volumes, Underneath the Bough and Wild Honey, Treby brings occasional and domestic poetry and religious devotion prominently into view. The thirty-one verse plays, which had some early moments of tenuous acclaim, are represented by seven lyrics. The unpublished pieces are of high quality, although many are clearly unfinished. Among the most interesting of these are five stanzas...