Leroy E. Mosher — Collected Poems

Leroy E. Mosher carried the Civil War, the railroad, and the newspaper composing room into early Southern California poetry. He enlisted in the Ninth Kansas Cavalry at fourteen, worked as a station agent and telegrapher at Colton, wrote comic journalism as Hank Wagoner, and joined the Los Angeles Times in 1887. There he became a political correspondent, editorial writer, managing editor, and creator of the recurring Eagle persona. His title poem turns a corroded bugle found beside the Pacific into an instrument of memory; the rest of his verse ranges from veterans’ elegies and civic occasion poems to California satire and typographic comedy. This edition resets all fifty-seven poems in the poetry section of his posthumous The Stranded Bugle (1905) and adds a focused appendix of his writing on poets, editors, newspapers, and print.