Competitive Reading on the California Coast
My fourth review for the The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge explores a book of poetry by Robinson Jeffers, poet of Big Sur. Rock and Hawk: A Selection of Shorter Poems
This is a book to own, one to read at leisure and revisit again and again. It is not one to read as I did, crammed into a plane trip from Texas to California and back, trying to absorb as much imagery as I could on a weeklong trip filled with fast cars, family and frenzy.
The collection starts with a nice introduction by the editor, Robert Hass, who spoke of Jeffers’ appreciation for the beauty of wholeness, where wars and violence are but one part of the whole of creation that includes the majesty of nature. He also spoke of Jeffers’ Puritan upbringing, his lifelong guilt over an adulterous affair and his politics of isolationism in a time when US imperialism was in its infancy.
The book includes selections from a number of smaller volumes of poetry, and though there are similar themes that unite Jeffers’ entire body of work, you lose the concentration and power of a compact book of poetry by piling it all up together like this. It’s much like listening to a greatest hits album. You lose a little of the power of the art by ripping it apart. Regardless, it’s still pretty powerful stuff.
The Puritanism and the guilt made me want to hate Robinson Jeffers. I had also received warnings from other poetry enthusiasts that he was depressing, obsessed with death and way too political. So the first poem was read with a pretty strong bias.
I may not have liked Robinson Jeffers as a person, but he was an undeniable talent as a poet. I was amazed at how he could look out at the beauty of nature and see in it the wretchedness of mankind. When many isolationists would see themselves as looking inward, he saw himself as looking outward, to God.
And all that stuff about death… righteous.