This new selection of work (the first in over three decades) includes previously unpublished material and reveals the beguiling style and technical ingenuity of one of American poetry’ s best-kept secrets. Suave, secretive and self-condemned to obscurity, Henri Coulette (1927– 88) was a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and winner the Lamont Poetry Prize. He stood out for his unfashionably brilliant command of poetry’ s formal resources, and the idiosyncratic range of his concerns, which include film noir and espionage, not to mention life’ s little ironies and larger tragedies. To read him, Zbigniew Herbert felt, was to be ‘ in the presence of a major poet’ , and one who had ‘ seized upon thematic material of central importance to the modern world’ . Henri Coulette (1927– 88), who spent most of his life in Los Angeles, was regarded as a master craftsman and a quiet original by his teachers Robert Lowell and John Berryman, his peers Donald Justice, W.D. Snodgrass, Thom Gunn, and Philip Levine.