Selected Poems

Jeffers Robinson

"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".

About the Author

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 Western Pennsylvania at the age of fifteen. In 1913 he married Una Call, and with the help of a legacy bought a stretch a land in California, where he helped to build Tor House hauling rocks from the beach. His first two books were undistinguished, but with "Roan Stallion", and "Tamar and Other Poems" he rapidly established a nationwide reputation. Altogether he published some twenty books of verse, and his version of Euripides's "Medea" had a successful run on Broadway. His popularity diminished after the Second World War and he died in 1962 at the age of seventy-five. In 1987 Carcanet published his "Selected Poems" honouring his verse spanning over twenty years.

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