Poems of Adoration

Description

~Original publisher’s purple cloth, striking gold-stamped design of a stylised altar (unsigned, but by friend of the authors Charles Ricketts, who designed several bindings for Michael Field) to front board and spine. Sunning to spine; mild wear to board and spine edges. 8vo (13.7 x 19.9cm). Top edges trimmed, other edges untrimmed. All edges purple (perhaps added by a previous owner?). Mild browning to endpapers; endpapers starting at gutters. Pictorial prayer card to front free endpaper, otherwise no ownership marks. A little scattered foxing, mostly to early and late pages. The last work of Edith Cooper, who together with Katharine Bradley published under the pseudonym Michael Field. Cooper died in 1913; Bradley nine months later. This volume of 67 devotional poems is largely the work of Cooper, but was still very much a collaborative project and was Michael Field’s first religious work, published after their conversion to Catholicism in 1907. It is ‘a series of verse meditations on the embodied experience of celebrating several of the Catholic Sacraments, including devotional reflection in anticipation of Mass, contemplation of saints and religious doctrines after receiving the Eucharist, and meditations after receiving Last Rites’ (Ehnenn, 2023, Michael Field’s Revisionary Poetics, 210), marked by ‘Cooper’s gorgeous lyrical effusions’ (Thain 2017, “Michael Field”: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle, 176) and a ‘metrical virtuosity’ that ballasts Field’s ‘theological engagement with the natural world and their newly discovered religious thoughts and feelings’ (Ehnenn 216). Scarce. Robust packaging. Tracking can be added to overseas orders on request.