Reviews

Whym Chow, Flame of Love by Michael Field

bilbobookins's review

O chow, the Peace of her I love above/ All else. O feeder of her heart forlorn,/ Sustainer of her torn,/ Conflicted Nature with a seamless love!

Whym Chow Flame of Love is a collection of poems written by Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley, known under their joint pseudonym, Michael Field. It is at once an elegy for their beloved dog, Whym Chow, and an exploration of grief, queer desire, and religion. With only twenty-seven copies printed, it was a highly private series of poems, and that exclusivity is compounded by the fact that Michael Field has faded into near-obscurity since the end of the fin-de-siecle movement. 

This collection is tough for me to review. I don't have a physical copy because none of Michael Field's poetry collections are currently in print. What I do have is an entire semester in which I'm going to be closely analyzing these poems for a critical essay slated for publication in the fall. Which means I'm going to get up close and personal with this collection. Which means, by spring, I'll either hate or love these poems. Shades of gray won't be an option. 

The thing about poetry is that I don't consider myself very good at reading it. I'm metre-deaf, and that makes me incredibly tentative with anything except free verse. 

The thing about Michael Field's poetry is that it's intentionally inaccessible. They have a penchant for using archaic language. They were highly educated, widely read, and part of the Aesthetic movement's literati that included people like Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, and the Brownings. They littered their poetry with references that are so far beyond the scope of my understanding that I have, on more than one occasion, been reduced to laying on my floor and staring for hours as if my ceiling fan might divine answers that extensive Googling hasn't. 

Yet I keep coming back to it. 

The layers of meaning in Whym Chow are innumerable, and the lack of scholarly work done on the collection only makes me more determined to flay each poem apart myself, to eke out even a sliver of understanding. So, I'm looking forward to a semester of diving in and out of these thirty poems, of trying to get a handle on just one of the handful of themes shot through the collection, of seeing if I can banish my poetic insecurity for just a few months by writing something worth reading about a body of work that few scholars have touched on to this point. 

This review is also available on my Book Log, https://bilbobookins.wordpress.com/2021/02/13/whym-chow-flame-of-love-by-michael-field/