On 27 October, I added a new title to the Paul Elder checklist, the first addition in eight years. Title #423 is Coulee, A Poem of Vision, by David Brown-Lewers. The one known copy is held by the Library of Congress, and I stumbled across it while looking for something else on the LC website.
The poem is an ode to the Perrine Coulee waterfall on the Snake River in Twin Falls, Idaho. The waterfall drops 200 feet and runs year round. In the winter, the trail to the falls is often covered in ice, and many large icicles form on the rock face. Brown-Lewers chose one such winter view for the tipped-in frontispiece.
Wikipedia reports that a coulee (from the French couler, to flow) describes “any of various different landforms, all of which are kinds of valleys or drainage zones. … In southern Louisiana, the word coulée (also spelled coolie) originally meant a gully or ravine usually dry or intermittent but becoming sizable during rainy weather. … In the northwestern United States, coulee is defined as a large, steep-walled, trench-like trough, which also include spillways and flood channels incised into the basalt plateau.”
This is a very slim booklet: the poem is just six pages long, with a two-page introduction by the poet. Unusually for Paul Elder, there is no colophon, which reinforces my belief that this is a vanity publication. Presumably, not many copies were printed, given that it took so long to discover this title. The copyright page lists “David Brown-Lewers, San Francisco,” but I can find no record of a person with that name in San Francisco. Rather to my surprise, I can find no record of a person with that name anywhere, except for this one book.
