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Selected Poems

Robinson Jeffers

Edited by Colin Falck

Cover of Selected Poems by Robinson Jeffers
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Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (128 pages)
(Pub. Jan 1996)
9780856357084
£11.99 £10.79
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  • Excerpt
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  • Contents
  • And you are from surf-rattled skerries. From the heaths
    where, burying a warrior, they broke his bones
    so he would not haunt the living. From the sea-night
    which you forefathers pulled over themselves, without a word.
    Above your head, no face, neither the sun's nor the moon's
    only the throbbing of galaxies, the immutable
    violence of first beginnings, of new destruction.
    The Czeslaw Milosz evokes the prophetic figure of the American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887 – 1962). Once the subject of a literary cult, Jeffers was later rejected by liberal taste and by the academic establishment. But in the last decade he has found a new audience. His indictments of the modern world are increasingly pertinent; the passion behind his writing, his subtle and strong rhythms and his clearsightedness set him in a class of his own. Colin Falck suggests that the neglect of Jeffers 'may be a measure of the spiritual voice at the heart of our culture, and a confirmation of some of his direst insights' – Jeffers's work has an energy and a spiritual intensity which are increasingly rare in poetry.

    Colin Falck draws mainly from Jeffers's shorter poems for this centenary edition, but also includes an extract from the celebrated translation of Euripides's Medea.
    Robinson Jeffers: American Romantic

    Selected Poetry, 1938
    To the Stone-Cutters
    Night
    Boats in a Fog
    Phenomena
    Shine, Perishing Republic
    Joy
    Science
    From Apology for Bad Dreams
    Ante Mortem
    Summer Holiday
    Fawn's Foster-Mother
    An Artist
    Soliloquy
    Tor House
    Hurt Hawks
    Birth-Dues
    Evening Ebb
    Hands
    November Surf
    The Bed by the Window
    Second-Best
    The Broadstone
    Iona: The Graves of Kings
    Shakespeare's Grave
    The Cruel Falcon
    Rock and Hawk
    Rearmament
    Ave Caesar
    The Trap
    Love the Wild Swan
    Return
    Steelhead
    The Purse-Seine
    Self-Criticism in February
    The Beaks of Eagles
    Shiva

    Be Angry at the Sun, 1941
    Prescription of Painful Ends
    Birthday
    The House Dog's Grave
    Watch the Lights Fade
    The Soul's Deser
    The Day is a Poem
    The Stars Go Over the Lonely Ocean
    For Una
    The Bloody Sire

    The Double Axe, 1948
    Calm and Full the Ocean
    The Eye
    The Inquisitors

    Hungerfield, 1954
    From Hungerfield
    Carmel Point
    Ocean
    The Beauty of Things
    The Old Stonemason
    The Deer Lay Down Their Bones

    The Beginning and the End, 1963
    Full Moon
    The Monstrous Drought
    Cremation
    Granddaughter
    Nightpiece
    Vulture
    Salvage
    Hand
    My Burial Place

    Medea, 1946
    From Medea

    Index of First Lines
    Robinson Jeffers
    Robinson Jeffers was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a successor to a long line of Scottish-Irish Calvinists and the son of a professor of classics and theology. His father taught him Greek, Latin and Hebrew as a boy, and he was educated privately in Germany and Switzerland before entering the University of ... read more
    Colin Falck
    COLIN FALCK teaches modern literature at York College, Pennsylvania. His publications include two poetry collections, Backwards into the Smoke and In This Dark Light ; an anthology of American and British poetry, Poems Since 1900 (edited with Ian Hamilton); Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poems ; and Myth, Truth and Literature, a ... read more
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