Jennie Kiefer — Collected Poems

Jennie Kiefer wrote from her South Grand Avenue home in a changing Los Angeles. Her poems move from meadow larks, love, death, and religious doubt to street grading, dangerous automobiles, civic monuments, naval pageantry, and the Pacific imagined as a chained blue dragon. She treated poetry as correspondence, sending topical verses to Theodore Roosevelt, John Masefield, David Lloyd George, General Pershing, and officers of the Great White Fleet, then preserving their replies beside the poems. Meadow-lark and Other Poems, published around 1910, joined intimate lyrics to poems about California and national affairs; privately printed Fugitive Poems returned to that work in 1923 and added a sequence shaped by the First World War. Kiefer’s patriotism can be blunt, but her war poems also register mass death, bodily ruin, and a crisis of faith. This edition resets all twenty poems in Meadow-lark and Other Poems, the ten new poems in Fugitive Poems, and ten substantially revised or retitled versions. It follows the books’ order and stanza structure while omitting ten near-identical reprints and removing narrow-page wraps and typographical debris.