Nephie J. Christoudoulides and Polina Mackay's edited collection of essays on the American poet H.D. is very welcome for a number of reasons. First, it marks H.D. out as a subject worthy of study and justifies her place among other leading lights of modernism; second, it directly addresses the fact of her canonical exclusion and incorporates a range of critical perspectives; third, it addresses the international contexts for reading her work; and fourth, it offers some detailed analysis of development and different stages in H.D.'s style as well as mapping some continuity between the different phases of her literary career.

The first part of this collection focusses on contexts and issues which will interest a diverse range of students of her work. It includes essays on “H.D. and the Literary Canon,” the autobiographical aspects of her writing, her important relationship with “little magazines,” aspects of her modernism, gender and queer theory and the influence and legacy of her work. The second part pays close attention to specific works, ranging from her early imagist work to later more dense prophetic writing. H.D.'s skills as a poet and prose writer are emphasized in equal measure and she also receives significant critical attention for her interest in translation. H.D.'s vital relation to Freud and her related sense of self and history are dealt with in an excellent final essay by Brenda Helt.

One of the ways in which this collection builds on our sense of H.D.'s poetic value is by offering a number of approaches that make her relevant to broader literary discussions. A fine example occurs in Jo Gill's essay on H.D.'s influence and legacy. She argues, for instance, that one of the poet's lasting legacies to modernist and subsequent poetic movements lies in her rethinking of the role of lyric voice. This is convincing because of her listing of radical later poets (such as Di Prima and Niedecker) who learned from H.D.'s consummate example. But there is a sense, too, in which this creates a false feeling of departure. The specific qualities that Gill discusses – the performance of different personae and fragmented, different subjectivities, the embrace of marginalized or objectivized perspectives and the willingness to speak about female desire – were not altogether new in H.D.'s writing. One could look, for example, to Emily Dickinson for an equally radical and much earlier contribution to modern lyric which might be described in exactly the same terms. While I can quite easily see that H.D.'s contribution to our idea of lyric poetry is distinct from, say, Dickinson's, the rapid pace of the essay does not allow for adequate discussion of that distinctiveness. We are left wondering whether the claim for H.D.'s impact on lyric is under- or overstated.

Perhaps this is unavoidable, given the ground that the author wishes to cover. It certainly invites a response, and any reader will be inspired to delve further. The breadth of an essay such as Gill's also provides an interesting juxtaposition with some of the more detailed analysis of poems found in essays by Diane Collecott and Sarah Graham in the second part of the volume. Narrower in focus, the essays in the second part of the volume provide examples of close reading which clarify H.D.'s relation to her own, and future, literary contexts. Collecott's essay, for example, uses Sea-Garden to situate H.D. beautifully within discussions of modernism, practical criticism and psychoanalysis. Graham's essay on Trilogy goes some way towards illustrating the contribution that H.D. made to expressions of female desire. And Eileen Gregory's excellent essay on “H.D. and Translation” demonstrates H.D.'s liminal self-positioning to be integral to her poetics and to her place in international modernism.

The Cambridge Companion to H.D. is likely to be a first port of call for students of H.D.'s work and for scholars of imagism, modernism, women's writing, lyric, queer theory and psychoanalysis in literature who want to better understand H.D.'s relevance to their field. The biggest surprise, perhaps, is that it has taken this long for H.D.'s significance to be realized.