Jean Burden — Collected Poems

Jean Burden wrote poems the way she taught them: patiently, alert to the pressure of every word, and unwilling to mistake decoration for discovery. Born in Illinois and resident in Southern California from 1946, she made an improbable national career from an Altadena cottage—editing poetry for Yankee for forty-seven years, teaching demanding private workshops, writing essays and animal-care bestsellers, and publishing poems in the country’s leading magazines. Her first collection, Naked as the Glass (1963), joins the bright surfaces of postwar Los Angeles to grief, desire, war anxiety, and spiritual doubt. Nearly three decades later, Taking Light from Each Other (1992) turns memory into a gallery of parents, lovers, poets, cats, dreams, and late-life reckonings. This edition restores both books complete and in their original order, keeps the five divisions of the later collection, and gathers the uncollected magazine poems from 1951 through 2003. The result reveals an exacting lyric intelligence whose California landscapes open continually onto the stranger weather of the mind.