The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, vol. 2: 1928–1938 ed. by Tim Hunt

Abstract

182 Western American Literature and war are inextricably linked in statement and in images equal in simple human power to those in Pound’s “River Merchant’s Wife.” The plight is stated in another way in a “letter” from “The Famous Old Man” who writes to young friends that “. . . the light is low; / houses slide downhill as usual in the West” and that “Oil and sanity leak / out everywhere. This is how it is. Fog too.” Loving remembrance is a major chord in these poems, as in “At Pilar for K.” where “Somewhere near here long ago / two lives held hands and spoke / of love.” But today “only the fragrance speaks.” A short poem titled “You” ends with this stanza: To have known one radiant kind of man is like owning a red tulip or an afternoon that lets the light through. Southwestern landscape is clearly the natural place for Juniper Woman to write of Cerro Gordo, fatal dawn, light, of being “exposed forever / on the red cliffs of the heart,” and of “the dream of the humble heart / Determined to dance . . . . ” The voice in the poems is of one who participates in the mythic reality of the sensory world. JAMES R. SAUCERMAN N orthw est Missouri State University T h e Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, vol. 2: 1928-1938. Edited by Tim Hunt. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. 610 pages, $60.00.) In Volume Two Tim Hunt continues his scrupulous editing, turning from those 1920s works in Volume One, which made Robinson Jeffers both famous and infamous, to what some would consider a middle period in the poet’s development. The volume also, in a sense, contains a swerve in Jeffers’s oeuvre, his sixteen poems of Ireland and England titled “Descent to the Dead,” which were written during his one trip abroad. By being arranged chronologically rather than along the lines of the original publication history—since poems planned for one volume were often carried over to another due to length and the publisher’s decisions—this collection untangles the poems and organizes them according to their pattern of creation. This provides readers with a better sense of the interconnections of Jeffers’s thematic concerns and the develop­ ment of his poetics and philosophy. For example, although the “Descent to the Dead” poems belong to the same writing period as D ear Judas and O ther Poems, they were published in Give Your H eart to the Hawks. This volume contains only one truly notorious long work, the dramatic poem “Dear Judas—or The Dreaming Dead,” but neither it nor the rest of the long poems here have received much critical attention; in contrast, many of Reviews 183 the most often anthologized and discussed short poems come from this same decade. A number of these poems have been long out of print. For example, Jeffers chose to reprint only four poems from the Dear Judas book in his 1938 Selected Poetry. In fact, Hunt has included here thirty-four poems omitted from that volume. Similarly, only about a fifth of the poems collected in the slim Selected Poems paperback are drawn from the individual books collected here. And they are arranged chronologically not by the dates of their writing but by the publication dates of the books in which they appeared, thus separating poems that actually belong together. The arrangement and publication of Volume Two of T h e Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, much more so than Volume One, promises to provide the opportunity for analysis of previously neglected poems and reconsideration of Jeffers’s poetic development. PATRICK D. MURPHY Indiana University of Pennsylvania T he N ight H ank Williams D ied: A Play in T w o A cts W ith Incidental Music. By Larry L. King. (Dallas: SMU Press, 1989. 120 pages, $14.75/$7.95.) There comes a time in the career of many popular writers when anything they write can be published. In the case of this play, the question is whether the script was worth a hardbound book; in the final analysis, I’m not sure it was. To a large degree, this text seems to exist more to allow...