Myron Broomell — Collected Poems

Myron Broomell brought a historian’s reach and a satirist’s pressure to mid-century American verse. Born into a Swedenborgian minister’s family, educated in Colorado, and later a teacher in Ohio, Los Angeles, and Durango, he wrote tightly made poems in which theology, bureaucracy, war, illness, marriage, and the American West repeatedly collide. His four books—published between 1947 and 1964—form a coherent, witty, severe body of work rescued here from a scattered periodical and small-press record.