Poetry review – NEW AND SELECTED POEMS: Ian Pople considers a new selection of poems by Henri Coulette (1927-1988)
New and Selected Poems
Henri Coulette
(eds. Michael Caines and Boris Dralyuk)
Carcanet
ISBN 9781800175525
161pp £14.99
As you might imagine, in their extensive introduction to this edition of the poetry of Henri Coulette, Michael Caines and Boris Dralyuk make quite big claims for Coulette. They point out that Coulette’s ‘remarkable refinement and exquisite formal control,’ had admirers from the start. They also point out that although Coulette’s first collection, The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems, won the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1966, his second collection, The Family Goldschmidt, was accidentally pulped at the publisher’s warehouse. This latter surely every poet’s nightmare. Caines and Dralyuk go on to tell us that Coulette taught at California State University for some decades and that he mentored a number of poets who went on to achievement. At the same time, Coulette was publishing less and less, even while he was still writing. As Caines and Dralyuk point out, Coulette’s tragically early death in 1988 at just 61 occurred just when the New Formalism movement in American poetry was gaining some traction, even if that traction was, in retrospect, quite short-lived.
In some ways, the claims for Coulette feels slightly overplayed. In that first book, The War of the Secret Agenet and Other Poems, many of the poems are in syllabics. This is not to decry Coulette’s ability with syllabics, but here, as elsewhere in this book, there sometimes seems a lack of pressure behind the poems. That title poem is a series of dramatic monologues and the sequence comes with a dramatis personae at its start. The introduction tells us that the poem ‘takes inspiration’ from ‘Jean Overton Fuller’s writings about SOE and its less fortunate agents in France, published during the 1950s.’ Caines and Dralyuk go on to quote Coulette’s comments that the poem is ‘really a way I had of describing my neurosis… to describe the way I saw the world.’ Caines and Dralyuk gloss this as relating to Coulette’s own difficult childhood with parents whose marriage rapidly disintegrated. For them, ‘the spy’s job of listening, watching, and keeping quiet had something fundamental in common with a the passage from childhood to adulthood.’ This is the final stanza of the sequence’s ‘Proem,’
They will appeal to lovers of the absurd:
there they were, bulging
with codes and automatics.
Like debutantes slumming on Skid Row,
they couldn’t be missed – they advertised
and Death reads all the papers.
The ‘they’ here are, I assume, the operatives sent into France by the SOE and the other characters in the sequence. I wouldn’t claim to be an expert on the Second World War and certainly not the lives and fates of operatives for the SOE. There’s a clear gift for imaginative writing here. However, I’m afraid that the emotions depicted here are rather lost on me. And I’m not sure I really understand why debutantes would be slumming on Skid Row or why the debutantes would be missed, unless Coulette has a rather different set of debutantes than the ones who might be associated with ‘coming out’ in the 1950s and 1960s Britain. The last two lines seem equally baffling; SOE did not advertise for operatives and certainly not in the newspapers. And it is unfortunate that this sequence seemed to inspire bafflement in the contemporary critics too. Caines and Dralyuk report Denis Donoghue declaring himself ‘stumped’ by the ‘Orphan Anni: The Broken Code,’ ‘the shortest part of the sequence, which consists of six lines of numerals.’ The editors suggest that this is Donoghue’s ‘especial laziness as a poetry critic.’
Better are the poems from the ‘lost’ The Family Goldschmidt. There are a number of pithy, driven poems, whose short lines accumulate energy and, often, pathos. These are the first four stanzas of the poem, ‘In a Strange Book,’
I read in a strange book,
While the sunlight moves on my back
And the dog at my foot stretches:
No word is ever lost,
For all the sound circles the earth,
Like a noose or a wristwatch
The sun moves off. The dog sleeps.
I close the book and the sound
Of the book closing rises.
A thread of hemp, a small jewel,
Among the quotations, flying,
Famous and infamous.
There is a wry surrealism to these lines which plays into Coulette’s strengths. The poem begins with a calm succession of quiet images. And the italicized verse begins by tapping into that quiet with a slightly skewed bathos, that might have the reader raising their eyebrows to question. But the third line there, ‘like a noose or a wristwatch,’ offers a much darker idea; firstly, that words are a kind of noose, or, next, appear to measure the temporality of our lives. The quietness returns in the third of these stanzas, but Coulette goes on to work the ideas of the italicized lines. Inside the quietness, it seems, the words resonate and become, themselves, images: a thread of hemp, with a level of ambiguity there as the hemp might be marijuana; secondly, a small jewel, a preciousness that is not too large or overwhelming.
Caines and Dralyuk give us a selection from a third manuscript, And Come to Closure, which they state ‘sat [at the time of this death] in a box in his closet, another secret.’ The poems in this selection are as varied as any in the book. However, to my mind, the selection also contains poems as good as any, too. The poem ‘Night Thoughts’ is ‘in memory of David Kubal.’ Here, Coulette riffs off the Renaissance poets. He introduces David Kubal walking his dog, ‘The leash like a line drive! / The two of you would rove the perfumed street, Pillar to post and terribly alive.’ It is a neat conceit that this was a street that was perfumed to the dog, and perhaps most ‘terribly alive’ to the dog too.
It is in this poem and others in the manuscript show what Coulette could do with form and rhyme in particular. This is the second verse,
Your kind of night, nothing more, nothing less;
A single lighted room, the shade drawn,
Your shadow enormous on the silver lawn,
The busy mockingbird, his rapturous fit,
The cricket keeping time, the loneliness
Of the man in the moon – and the man under it.
The noun phrases are simple in their construction, usually an article, an adjective and then a noun, apart from the phrases where there is an archaism of noun then adjectives, i.e., ‘the shade drawn / Your shadow enormous’. That repetitious simplicity might have created a rather heavy, stilted rhythm. However, the phrases lead to the final image of the man in the moon and the man walking his dog in that moonlight. This is followed in the next verse by,
The word elsewhere was always on your lips,
A password to some secret, inner place
Where Wisdome smiled in Beautie’s looking-glass
And Pleasure was at home in dearest Honour.
The quietly emphatic repetitions of the preceding verse lead to the poignance of the start of the next where it is language ‘the word elsewhere’ that adds a new dimension and tone to the portrayal we have just had. That language and tone moves on to the archaisms of the capitalized words which introduce another note entirely, as if Kubal wanted to live in a rather more courtly world than the one he found himself it. It would be possible to feel that Coulette has done rather too much work here; that the Kubal he portrays is, at heart, a bit of an anachronism. And perhaps Kubal was, but Coulette has contextualized that language in ways which deepen the description rather than ironise. As Coulette goes on to write,
Now you are elsewhere, elsewhere comes to this,
The thoughtless body, like a windblown rose,
Is gathered up and ushered toward repose.
That ‘windblown rose’ seems wholly appropriate as does the way it leads to the word, ‘repose.’
Carcanet have recently resuscitated the reputations of a number of writers otherwise lost to posterity: Julian Orde, ‘Bunny’ Lang, Lynette Roberts. Henri Coulette is a fine addition to that list.
Aug 6 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Henri Coulette
Poetry review – NEW AND SELECTED POEMS: Ian Pople considers a new selection of poems by Henri Coulette (1927-1988)
New and Selected Poems
Henri Coulette
(eds. Michael Caines and Boris Dralyuk)
Carcanet
ISBN 9781800175525
161pp £14.99
As you might imagine, in their extensive introduction to this edition of the poetry of Henri Coulette, Michael Caines and Boris Dralyuk make quite big claims for Coulette. They point out that Coulette’s ‘remarkable refinement and exquisite formal control,’ had admirers from the start. They also point out that although Coulette’s first collection, The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems, won the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1966, his second collection, The Family Goldschmidt, was accidentally pulped at the publisher’s warehouse. This latter surely every poet’s nightmare. Caines and Dralyuk go on to tell us that Coulette taught at California State University for some decades and that he mentored a number of poets who went on to achievement. At the same time, Coulette was publishing less and less, even while he was still writing. As Caines and Dralyuk point out, Coulette’s tragically early death in 1988 at just 61 occurred just when the New Formalism movement in American poetry was gaining some traction, even if that traction was, in retrospect, quite short-lived.
In some ways, the claims for Coulette feels slightly overplayed. In that first book, The War of the Secret Agenet and Other Poems, many of the poems are in syllabics. This is not to decry Coulette’s ability with syllabics, but here, as elsewhere in this book, there sometimes seems a lack of pressure behind the poems. That title poem is a series of dramatic monologues and the sequence comes with a dramatis personae at its start. The introduction tells us that the poem ‘takes inspiration’ from ‘Jean Overton Fuller’s writings about SOE and its less fortunate agents in France, published during the 1950s.’ Caines and Dralyuk go on to quote Coulette’s comments that the poem is ‘really a way I had of describing my neurosis… to describe the way I saw the world.’ Caines and Dralyuk gloss this as relating to Coulette’s own difficult childhood with parents whose marriage rapidly disintegrated. For them, ‘the spy’s job of listening, watching, and keeping quiet had something fundamental in common with a the passage from childhood to adulthood.’ This is the final stanza of the sequence’s ‘Proem,’
They will appeal to lovers of the absurd:
there they were, bulging
with codes and automatics.
Like debutantes slumming on Skid Row,
they couldn’t be missed – they advertised
and Death reads all the papers.
The ‘they’ here are, I assume, the operatives sent into France by the SOE and the other characters in the sequence. I wouldn’t claim to be an expert on the Second World War and certainly not the lives and fates of operatives for the SOE. There’s a clear gift for imaginative writing here. However, I’m afraid that the emotions depicted here are rather lost on me. And I’m not sure I really understand why debutantes would be slumming on Skid Row or why the debutantes would be missed, unless Coulette has a rather different set of debutantes than the ones who might be associated with ‘coming out’ in the 1950s and 1960s Britain. The last two lines seem equally baffling; SOE did not advertise for operatives and certainly not in the newspapers. And it is unfortunate that this sequence seemed to inspire bafflement in the contemporary critics too. Caines and Dralyuk report Denis Donoghue declaring himself ‘stumped’ by the ‘Orphan Anni: The Broken Code,’ ‘the shortest part of the sequence, which consists of six lines of numerals.’ The editors suggest that this is Donoghue’s ‘especial laziness as a poetry critic.’
Better are the poems from the ‘lost’ The Family Goldschmidt. There are a number of pithy, driven poems, whose short lines accumulate energy and, often, pathos. These are the first four stanzas of the poem, ‘In a Strange Book,’
I read in a strange book,
While the sunlight moves on my back
And the dog at my foot stretches:
No word is ever lost,
For all the sound circles the earth,
Like a noose or a wristwatch
The sun moves off. The dog sleeps.
I close the book and the sound
Of the book closing rises.
A thread of hemp, a small jewel,
Among the quotations, flying,
Famous and infamous.
There is a wry surrealism to these lines which plays into Coulette’s strengths. The poem begins with a calm succession of quiet images. And the italicized verse begins by tapping into that quiet with a slightly skewed bathos, that might have the reader raising their eyebrows to question. But the third line there, ‘like a noose or a wristwatch,’ offers a much darker idea; firstly, that words are a kind of noose, or, next, appear to measure the temporality of our lives. The quietness returns in the third of these stanzas, but Coulette goes on to work the ideas of the italicized lines. Inside the quietness, it seems, the words resonate and become, themselves, images: a thread of hemp, with a level of ambiguity there as the hemp might be marijuana; secondly, a small jewel, a preciousness that is not too large or overwhelming.
Caines and Dralyuk give us a selection from a third manuscript, And Come to Closure, which they state ‘sat [at the time of this death] in a box in his closet, another secret.’ The poems in this selection are as varied as any in the book. However, to my mind, the selection also contains poems as good as any, too. The poem ‘Night Thoughts’ is ‘in memory of David Kubal.’ Here, Coulette riffs off the Renaissance poets. He introduces David Kubal walking his dog, ‘The leash like a line drive! / The two of you would rove the perfumed street, Pillar to post and terribly alive.’ It is a neat conceit that this was a street that was perfumed to the dog, and perhaps most ‘terribly alive’ to the dog too.
It is in this poem and others in the manuscript show what Coulette could do with form and rhyme in particular. This is the second verse,
Your kind of night, nothing more, nothing less;
A single lighted room, the shade drawn,
Your shadow enormous on the silver lawn,
The busy mockingbird, his rapturous fit,
The cricket keeping time, the loneliness
Of the man in the moon – and the man under it.
The noun phrases are simple in their construction, usually an article, an adjective and then a noun, apart from the phrases where there is an archaism of noun then adjectives, i.e., ‘the shade drawn / Your shadow enormous’. That repetitious simplicity might have created a rather heavy, stilted rhythm. However, the phrases lead to the final image of the man in the moon and the man walking his dog in that moonlight. This is followed in the next verse by,
The word elsewhere was always on your lips,
A password to some secret, inner place
Where Wisdome smiled in Beautie’s looking-glass
And Pleasure was at home in dearest Honour.
The quietly emphatic repetitions of the preceding verse lead to the poignance of the start of the next where it is language ‘the word elsewhere’ that adds a new dimension and tone to the portrayal we have just had. That language and tone moves on to the archaisms of the capitalized words which introduce another note entirely, as if Kubal wanted to live in a rather more courtly world than the one he found himself it. It would be possible to feel that Coulette has done rather too much work here; that the Kubal he portrays is, at heart, a bit of an anachronism. And perhaps Kubal was, but Coulette has contextualized that language in ways which deepen the description rather than ironise. As Coulette goes on to write,
Now you are elsewhere, elsewhere comes to this,
The thoughtless body, like a windblown rose,
Is gathered up and ushered toward repose.
That ‘windblown rose’ seems wholly appropriate as does the way it leads to the word, ‘repose.’
Carcanet have recently resuscitated the reputations of a number of writers otherwise lost to posterity: Julian Orde, ‘Bunny’ Lang, Lynette Roberts. Henri Coulette is a fine addition to that list.