Looking for a recognized poet who would translate Eskimo songs and legends to teach gradeschool children about the Native American traditions, the Education Development Center of Massachusetts selected Edward Field because, as he was told, he was the only poet who could be understood by ten-year-olds. The center's response was typical of many readers who are first drawn to Field's work by the accessibility of his style. Richard Howard notes in Preferences (1974) "that mysterious tonality of Edward Field's poetry: a poetry without meter, rhyme, image, without the diet of disciplines and strictures we think of as constituting that shaped share of literature required by verse." But as Howard recognizes, jettisoning the normal expectations and conventions of verse does not result, in Field's case, in a poetry that is undisciplined, defective, or merely easy. To the contrary, "by articulating an impulse which usually begins before 'literature,'" Field has...