Berthold Convers Huber — Tujunga Songs

Berthold Convers Huber is now almost invisible outside the single book he published at Balboa Beach in 1922, but Tujunga Songs is anything but a minor curiosity. It moves from comic fairy spectacle and philosophical fable to canyon weather, labor, spiritual declaration, shaped lines, and a closing group of sonnets. Huber invokes Thomas Troward, Shelley, Herman Kuehn, and the trickster Mercury; he also listens closely to rain, stone, linemen, camp talk, and the Big Tujunga itself. The book’s exuberance can be odd, funny, earnest, and formally adventurous in the space of a page. This edition resets the complete collection while preserving its internal Tujunga and sonnet divisions and the visible indentation of its most experimental poems.