Henri Coulette — The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems
Henri Coulette’s first book arrived in 1966 already carrying the strange mixture that would define him: Los Angeles movie lore, family grief, formal poise, junk-shop comedy, spiritual unease, and the compromised glamour of espionage. The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems grew from his childhood love of adventure stories and from his later fascination with masks, evidence, betrayal, and voices that cannot quite be trusted. Its title sequence reconstructs the destroyed Prosper network of Britain’s Special Operations Executive through agents, officials, scholars, survivors, and ghosts; the shorter poems move among Hollywood, translations and imitations, private memory, city life, and Coulette’s dry theatrical wit. Selected for the Academy of American Poets’ Lamont Poetry Prize and published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, the collection established Coulette nationally. This edition presents that 1966 book alone, in its original order and divisions. It does not reproduce later poems or the editorial and critical matter of the posthumous Collected Poems.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Bibliography
The License and the Limit: Four Poems. privately printed, 1958.
The Attic. PhD dissertation, State University of Iowa, 1959.
With Paul Engle and Donald Justice, editors. Midland: The Writing Workshops of the State University of Iowa. Random House, 1961.
Ed. The Unstrung Lyre: Interviews with Fourteen Poets. Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, 1965.
The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966.
With Philip Levine, editor. Character and Crisis: A Contemporary Reader. McGraw-Hill, 1966.
The Family Goldschmitt. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971.
The Collected Poems of Henri Coulette. Edited by Donald Justice and Robert Mezey. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1990.