And Buckets 01 Blood

THE DOUBLE AXE (149 pp.)--Robinson Jeffers--Random House ($2.75).

The poet who wishes not to play games with words,

His affair being to awake dangerous images

And call the hawks . . .

Readers of this book of poems are advised in a highly unusual (and ungrammatical) publisher's note that Random House does not agree with some of the political views pronounced by the poet Robinson Jeffers. When those hawks are being called, Random House wants it known that its own big mouth was shut.

Jeffers' political views are, in fact, stark and skinny as a buzzard's craw. His new lyrics say that the U.S. was embroiled in World War II by "liars," that the U.S. dead in the war were "gypped," that the effect of U.S. entry was to "[level] the powers of Europe" and make balance, or peace, impossible; that, as a result, a third World War is coming, and that in it, or in the next, the U.S. will suffer "the brutal horror of defeat."

The Not-Man. What gives these sentiments interest is that behind them is Jeffers' one great, violent insight into the nature of things--an insight that has kept him going as a poet for 20 years, has formed his famous style, and made him a faintly theatrical, gloom-wrapped figure in U.S. poetry. He describes this insight as "a certain philosophical attitude, which might be called Inhumanism, a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence . . ."

The last phrase refers to the physical universe as seen from the coast range at Carmel, Calif. In the scale of this pure spectacle, at which John Robinson (Robin) Jeffers has been staring in awe since he settled at Carmel in 1914, human lives and the human race itself look infinitely tiny and disgusting to him; having beheld the stars above the sea he has seemed to conclude, for example, that the love of man and woman is nastiness. Critics who inquire how the conclusion follows from the evidence have been referred by the poet to "instinct," i.e., no rational process is involved.

In Part I of the longest poem in Jeffers' new book, a boy killed on a Pacific beachhead furiously reassumes his corpse ("I poured my soul with sickening pain into my body again") and returns to a California ranch, there to terrify his patriotic father and adulterous mother, taunting them with blasphemies, cursing the war they sent him to, trying to make horrible love to her, and eventually killing his father and his mother's lover. The force of this poem comes from the suggestion that a soldier foully killed in the insane violence of modern combat would retain the violence--and insanity--after death; its weakness comes of pushing this suggestion too far, implying that no human kindness or decency could survive modern warfare, and thus turning what might have been a tragic moral struggle into a necrophiliac nightmare.

The Shameless Floodlights. Several of Jeffers' shorter fables in The Double Axe are equally notable for the poetic use of putrefaction, incest (an old theme, symbolizing "humanism"), and for dipping in buckets of blood. Elsewhere, in Jeffers' short lyrics, a balance of a kind is kept between the polar simplicities that make up the poet's "philosophical attitude." For example, Dawn:

Steep and black the mountain to the

graying sky; no star but the morning

star Swims that gray lake. Down here it is

deep night; dark gleams the surf on

the skerries. West it is night; the great unfaded

tapestries of winter heaven, Orion

and his dog walk north In the night on the sea. There is nothing

on earth nor perhaps in the vast of

heaven so pure, so desirable As this hour and this scene.

Yet the strain sticks. It is a bitter sickness That rock and water and sky should be

what they are, and men -- what we

are. Oh, we escape it sometimes. But in the shameless floodlights of war

and peace, the crimes and the lies, the

daily news that no doubt Nobody ought to listen to -- but that

also would be a kind of betrayal --what an ass life looks. High on the dawn the enormous angular

shadows of a sick ass being clubbed to

death.

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