Julia Boynton Green — Collected Poems

Julia Boynton Green made Southern California landscape answer the changing pressures of a long poetic life. The young New York writer of Lines and Interlines worked in polished nineteenth-century forms; after moving to Redlands in 1893, she found new subjects in poppy fields, desert hills, mountain light, gardens, illness, travel, civic life, and the Pacific coast. This Enchanting Coast and Noonmark reveal a poet whose formal sonnets and lyrics could be tender, humorous, devotional, skeptical, and sharply observant. Her work also belonged to a literary marriage: Levi Worthington Green wrote poetry and fiction, and both appeared in the magazines that helped define regional culture. This Collected Poems brings Green’s books together with her extensive newspaper and magazine verse, allowing readers to follow a career that moved from inherited forms toward a distinctive California clarity.