J. Lawrence Mitchell: Gerri Kimber and Angela Smith, eds, The Poetry and Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield

Summary

Just two years after the publication of The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield in two volumes comes another handsomely produced and admirably edited book, The Poetry and Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield, the third volume in The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield. The materials brought together here have been drawn from archives around the world – Austin, Texas, London, New York and Wellington, New Zealand – and the editors, Gerri Kimber and Angela Smith, have also fruitfully drawn upon the specialised knowledge of experts in translation studies (Claire Davison) and in Polish (Miroslawa Kubasiewicz). Mansfield scholarship is truly international in scope!

‘What Volume 3 […] demonstrates’, say the editors, is ‘the scale of [Mansfield's] intellectual achievement, with intelligence and imagination vigorously interacting’ (xxv). Indeed, they seem to have identified and included ‘every piece of non-fiction’ that Mansfield wrote – excepting only the diaries, which are to appear in the fourth and final volume – and they proudly emphasise ‘the new material presented in this volume for the first time, and in every section’ (xxi). This volume is divided into four parts: Poems and Songs; Translations; Parodies, Pastiches and Aphorisms; Reviews and Essays. There are also eight wellchosen illustrations, most of them never before published.

The editors are under no illusion that Mansfield had hitherto unrecognised talent as a poet, and they acknowledge only ‘flashes of brilliance in a mostly mediocre collection’. This may be unnecessarily defensive, given their remit to publish ‘all of KM's extant work, fiction and non- fiction, good and bad, youthful and mature’ (xxi) and that Mansfield never made any claims about herself as a poet. They also resist the temptation to follow Vincent O'Sullivan in treating Mansfield's evocative vignettes in the style of Ernest Dowson as prose poems that open the way to her ‘special prose’. However, the editors have expanded the published corpus from 84 to 179 poems and poetic fragments, while recognising that many of these ‘often read as stepping stones, not written primarily with publication in mind’ (3). Yet it must be said that some of the poems of Mansfield's maturity have real merit and undeniable lyrical power, especially ‘To L.H.B.’, the moving elegy for her dead brother, and ‘To Stanley Wyspianski’. Many others at least have biographical interest to commend them.