Charles Antone Cavalli — Collected Poems

Charles Antone Cavalli spent much of his life far from literary institutions, keeping a general store in La Honda and serving his rural San Mateo County community as an election officer and deputy sheriff. His posthumous Selected Poems (1945), a private Los Angeles printing of three hundred copies, reveals an unexpectedly rigorous California poet. Cavalli rejected decorative rhyme and what he called false optimism for compressed meditations on redwoods, the Pacific, Southern California canyons, war, mortality, and the dangerous conformities of the crowd. This edition restores all fifty poems in their original sequence, correcting damaged OCR while preserving the book's stanza structure and meaningful indentation.