This new selection of work (the first in over three decades) includes previously unpublished material and reveals the beguiling style and technical ingenuity of one of American poetrys best-kept secrets.
Suave, secretive and self-condemned to obscurity, Henri Coulette (192788) was a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, and winner the Lamont Poetry Prize. He stood out for his unfashionably brilliant command of poetrys formal resources, and the idiosyncratic range of his concerns, which include film noir and espionage, not to mention lifes little ironies and larger tragedies. To read him, Zbigniew Herbert felt, was to be in the presence of a major poet, and one who had seized upon thematic material of central importance to the modern world.
Henri Coulette (192788), who spent most of his life in Los Angeles, was regarded as a master craftsman and a quiet original by his teachers Robert Lowell and John Berryman, his peers Donald Justice, W.D. Snodgrass, Thom Gunn, and Philip Levine.
Henri Coulette (1927-1988), who spent most of his life in Los Angeles, was regarded as a master craftsman and a quiet original by his teachers Robert Lowell and John Berryman, his peers Donald Justice, W.D. Snodgrass, Thom Gunn, and Philip Levine, and his students Wanda Coleman, Michael Harper, and Luis Omar Salinas. His first volume, The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems (1966), won the Lamont Poetry Prize and received significant praise, but his second, The Family Goldschmitt (1971), was accidentally pulped by the distributor. A third volume only saw publication as part of his Collected Poems (1990), now long out of print.
Michael Caines works at the Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2013) and the editor of a TLS bicentennial celebration of Jane Austen. He is writing a short book about literary prizes, and a slightly longer book about Brigid Brophy. He is founding editor of the Brixton Review of Books.
Boris Dralyuk is the author of My Hollywood and Other Poems (2022), editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (2016), co-editor of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015), and the translator of Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov, and other authors. His poems, translations, and criticism have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Best American Poetry 2023, and elsewhere, and he is the recipient, most recently, of the 2022 Gregg Barrios Translation Prize from the National Book Critics Circle and of a 2024 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Formerly editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, he is currently an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Tulsa, a Tulsa Artist Fellow, and the editor in chief of Nimrod International Journal.
