California Hybrid

SUCH COUNSELS You GAVE TO ME

Robinson Jeffers--Random House

($2.50).

Poets want to take truth by the hand; prophets want to get truth by the tail. A hybrid of poet and prophet is tomahawk-faced Robinson Jeffers, almost as much famed in the U. S. for doing his writing in a stone tower, built by himself, over-looking California's Carmel Bay, as for his violent free-verse narratives and black-diamond lyrics in Tamar, Roan Stallion, The Women at Point Sur, Cawdor, et al. Jeffers' latest book, Such Counsels You Gave to Me, is predominantly in his prophetic vein. Its title-poem is a fast-moving narrative of a student's sick return from premedical school to the farm of his swinish father and mother. In an atmosphere supercharged with nervous prostration, sadism, fornication, drunkenness, adultery and lack of funds the young student, at his mother's instigation poisons his father. Maternal incest and suicide are thereafter overwhelmingly indicated, but Author Jeffers finally prescribes his hero's self-sacrificial surrender to the Law to put his story out of its misery. From the residue of ideological wreckage readers may salvage some souvenirs of sense by recalling that incest, in Jeffersian prophecy, symbolizes "racial introversion: man regarding man exclusively--founding his values, desires, a picture of the universe, all on his own humanity."

Few such symbological catch-alls confuse the book's shorter poems. They are mostly straightforward recordings of what Poet-Prophet Jeffers sees and feels when he looks around him in A.D. 1937. Samples:

The age darkens, Europe mixes her cups of deah, all the little Caesars fidget on their thrones. The old wound opens its clotted mouth to ask for new wounds. Men will fight through; men have tough hearts . . . I see far fires and dim degradation Under the warplanes and neither Christ nor Lenin will save you. I see the March rain walk on the mountain, sombre and lovely on the green mountain. . . . I wish you could find the secure value, The allheal I found . . . The splendor of inhuman things. . . .

Occasionally Poet Jeffers presents splendid glimpses, not of inhuman, but of non-human things:

Perhaps their wildness will never die from these mountains. The eagle still dawns over the ridges like a dark sun . . .

Such glimpses, however, are few and cursory. The book as a whole reveals no new juxtaposition of the parts of Jeffers' hybrid nature, but rather a wearied division between them--with the aging prophet still hell-bent on emitting clouds of sulphur and smoke, and the poet simultaneously becoming more and more corner-loving and mealy-eyed.

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