New and Selected Poems

This new selection of work (the first in over three decades) includes previously unpublished material and reveals the beguiling style and technical ingenuity of one of American poetry’s best-kept secrets. Suave, secretive and self-condemned to obscurity, Henri Coulette (1927–88) 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 poetry’s formal resources, and the idiosyncratic range of his concerns, which include film noir and espionage, not to mention life’s 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 (1927–88), 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.