What Though the Field Be Lost : LSU Press : 9780807173633 : 0807173630 : 30 Jan 2021 : ""What Though the Field Be Lost" uses the battlefield there as setting and subject for poetry that engages with ongoing conversations about race, regional identity, and the ethics of memory in the United States. With compassion and empathy, as well as humor and humility, Kempf stitches documentary details-incorporating language from monuments, soldiers' letters, and eyewitness accounts of the battle-alongside personal moments and reflections that capture the overlapping planes of historical past and public present. Milton's famously charismatic Satan offers a model of the allure in which evil can be veiled, as Kempf investigates the ambivalences and evasions involved in any understanding of national, or nationalist, identity. The author's experiences living in Gettysburg are read, in turn, against Milton's account of Adam and Eve, the book's title alluding to the fact that, though the Civil War itsel