Henri Coulette — The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems

Henri Coulette made Los Angeles poetry urbane, haunted, and slyly theatrical. A native Angeleno who passed through Santa Fe, the Army, RKO, Los Angeles State College, and the remarkable postwar Writers’ Workshop at Iowa, he returned home in 1959 and became one of Cal State Los Angeles’s defining teachers. His Lamont Prize collection The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems (1966) joined espionage, family memory, junk shops, Hollywood, and spiritual unease in poems whose formal polish sharpened rather than softened their comedy and grief. The Family Goldschmitt (1971), much of whose print run was reportedly destroyed, grew stranger and more graphic as it confronted the Holocaust, Vietnam, political violence, private loss, and the difficult knowledge of being American. This edition presents those two lifetime books complete, restoring their original order, divisions, typography, shaped arrangements, epigraphs, and relative line indents. Together they reveal a singular Los Angeles intelligence: learned without display, technically exact without stiffness, and alert to the treacherous exchange between public masks and private lives.