Cyrus Caswell Johnson — Collected Poems

Cyrus Caswell Johnson made poetry from a life that offered little leisure for a literary career. Brought to Los Angeles as a child, he left school at nine for a blacksmith’s shop, served in the Army, joined the police department, and became locally celebrated as the city’s “policeman-poet.” His verse traveled through newspapers, church services, club programs, radio broadcasts, and public recitals before Pools of Glass and Other Poems appeared from the Times-Mirror Press in 1924. Its poems of childhood, bereavement, war, faith, California landscape, and civic memory preserve both the aspiration and the strain of a self-educated working writer. This Collected Poems restores the complete book and the recovered broadcast poem “Beauty for Ashes,” giving renewed visibility to an Angeleno whose daily labor, public service, and lyric imagination remained inseparable.