Emanations: With its tragic narrative, the song “South Coast” is the most well known song of early California, the era of ranchos and vaqueros, and the Monterey–Big Sur central coast area. A poem that was originally titled “The Coast Ballad,” written in 1926 by Lillian Bos Ross, it became the basis of Ross’s novel The Stranger (1942). That same year, Sam Eskin provided the melody to the original ballad and Richard Dehr and Frank Miller gave it an arrangement we now associate with “South Coast.” The Kingston Trio did perhaps the most widely known recording of the song, although Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s version is without peer.
I’ve chosen not to include work from two stand-alone volumes, the book-length sonnet sequence Prism and the book The Face: A Novella in Verse. Also, poems from two collections of previously “uncollected” poems, In the Pines: Lost Poems, 1972–1997 and The Window: Poems, 1998–2012, have been omitted from this collection.
In memoriam—These poems are also dedicated to the memory of: Italo Calvino; Galway Kinnell; Philip Levine; Larry Levis; Adrienne Rich; Mark Strand; and C. K. Williams.