Best known for her position as the only female member of the "Golden Gate Trinity" (also known as the "Overland Trinity"), Ina Coolbrith earned her literary reputation from poetry published in periodicals alongside the work of Bret Harte and Charles Warren Stoddard, its other members. Private and often mysterious, Coolbrith appears unusual company for such literary lights in California's Golden Era of the 1860s as Ambrose Bierce, Harte, Joaquin Miller, Edward Rowland Sill, and Mark Twain. Yet her sometimes tragic, personally withdrawn life led not to the sentimental and stereotypically "female" verse characteristic of her time but to a mature, vigorous, and technically accomplished poetry rich in religious and nature imagery. Some 250 uncollected poems and three substantial books, A Perfect Day, and Other Poems (1881), Songs from the Golden Gate (1895), and the posthumously published Wings of Sunset (1929), mark her in the forefront of poetic tradition in an often anti-intellectual...