This review is taken from PN Review 291, Volume 53 Number 1, September - October 2026.
on Henri Coulette
Henri Coulette, New and Selected Poems, edited by Michael Caines and Boris Dralyuk (Carcanet) £14.99
Alone with What We Are
In the introduction to his translation of Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems (1974), Jonathan Griffin posited ‘what may be the essential modern kind of poet: the objective introvert’. However much this is true of Pessoa, it is certainly the case with Henri Coulette.
Imagine you are born into a world of wide spaces, where towns and cities do not feel cramped and no particular identity is pressed upon you. Such was the California of Coulette’s birth, the truck farms, fisheries and canneries of John Steinbeck along with the cinematic vistas of Hollywood. Thom Gunn (whom Coulette came to know) was already writing about motorcycle gangs and Elvis Presley in the 1950s, but for Coulette it was the space of the imagination, the exploration of his sense of selfhood. Essentially, it was a quiet poetry that became overlooked when everyone around him was breaking bad, mad and very troubling to know, voices that were highly marketable in a world that preferred poetry as personal drama to poetry as craft.
But Henri Coulette was not out on a limb. After a very late war service (1945) he was able to begin an academic career, and study with Robert Lowell and John Berryman at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with contemporaries W.D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice and Robert Mezey. And there was a renewed interest in metrical poetry, from Robert Lowell’s early Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) to the later work of Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, James Merrill and Donald Justice.
Coulette’s first collection ...
In the introduction to his translation of Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems (1974), Jonathan Griffin posited ‘what may be the essential modern kind of poet: the objective introvert’. However much this is true of Pessoa, it is certainly the case with Henri Coulette.
Imagine you are born into a world of wide spaces, where towns and cities do not feel cramped and no particular identity is pressed upon you. Such was the California of Coulette’s birth, the truck farms, fisheries and canneries of John Steinbeck along with the cinematic vistas of Hollywood. Thom Gunn (whom Coulette came to know) was already writing about motorcycle gangs and Elvis Presley in the 1950s, but for Coulette it was the space of the imagination, the exploration of his sense of selfhood. Essentially, it was a quiet poetry that became overlooked when everyone around him was breaking bad, mad and very troubling to know, voices that were highly marketable in a world that preferred poetry as personal drama to poetry as craft.
But Henri Coulette was not out on a limb. After a very late war service (1945) he was able to begin an academic career, and study with Robert Lowell and John Berryman at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with contemporaries W.D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice and Robert Mezey. And there was a renewed interest in metrical poetry, from Robert Lowell’s early Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) to the later work of Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, James Merrill and Donald Justice.
Coulette’s first collection ...
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