author
George Blackstone Field
1883–1952
A poet of the Canadian frontier and the First World War, his work drew on lived experience as an engineer, surveyor, and soldier. His verse carries both the toughness of field life and a clear feeling for place, duty, and memory.
1 Audiobook
Rhymes of the Survey and Frontier
by George Blackstone Field
About the author
Born in London in 1883, George Blackstone Field later made his life in Canada, where he worked as a civil engineer and surveyor. Reliable catalog and author records connect him with western Canadian life and identify him as the author of Rhymes of the Survey and Frontier (1911), a poetry collection shaped by the landscapes and hardships of survey work.
Field also had a military background. Sources note that he had served with the British army in South Africa before immigrating to Canada, and that after volunteering in August 1914 he served with the 1st Divisional Engineers during the First World War, eventually reaching the rank of captain. Those experiences seem to have fed directly into the later war poems associated with Echoes from Ypres, published in 1954.
After the war, he returned to Canada and was later associated with Saskatoon and Vancouver. He died in 1952. Though not widely known today, his poetry preserves a vivid record of frontier labor, wartime service, and the lives of people working far from the center of things.