Selected Poems 1938–1988 by Thomas McGrath (review)

Reviews 83 Hunt has provided an excellent biographical introduction, correcting the erroneous impression that Albert Gelpi’s foreword to Everson’s book perpetu­ ates: the notion that Jeffers was not only isolated from, but also ignorant of, the modernism he rejected. Hunt demonstrates that Jeffers’s rejection was thoughtful and informed. He also sketches the development in the late teens and early twenties of Jeffers’s poetics and then briefly limns the rest of his life. William Everson’s The Excesses of God treats the topic of Robinson Jeffers, but its real subject is the definition of the contemporary religious poet. This extended meditation works much like one of Jeffers’s narratives, drawing the reader in and making one believe the vision, even as one might resist the argument. And resist this argument one must, as it contains numerous contra­ dictions. Part One has the greatest strength, as Everson lays his foundation, building on the work of Rudolph Otto and Mircea Eliade to define and apply Otto’sconcept of the numinous to Jeffers’spoetry. This section helps the reader to understand better much of Jeffers’s work but also reveals the limitations of trying to find a unifying architectonics. Part Two contextualizes Jeffers’s “excess” in the social excesses of his times, and depicts the power that arises from his abiding seriousness: “One is left with the disturbing impression that this man means it.”But here Everson also begins to falter as he engages in a dionysian worship of “divine wrath,” and employs tautologies to demonstrate the superiority of the religious “man” over the skeptical and nonreligious one. But the real failing of this book lies in the male chauvinism of Part Three. There Everson posits that the mantles of poet, mystic, and prophet can only be placed on male shoulders, not only ignoring but actually rationalizing away the strong female characters of Jeffers’s poems. He does this in order to use Jeffers to inscribe his own selfimage of the religious poet. The latter section of this part, however, does pro­ vide a valuable comparative analysis of the shaman and the religious poet. The Excesses of God is more a meditation cm Jeffers’s influence on Everson and Everson’s own self-conception, with some valuable insights into Jeffers’s poetry to be found along the way, than it is a study of Jeffers per se. PATRICK D. MURPHY Indiana University of Pennsylvania Selected Poems 1938-1988. By Thomas McGrath. (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 1988. 224 pages, $10.00.) In one handsome and very readable volume, the best poems from fifty years of work by one of America’s truly important poets are presented. There are poems from all of McGrath’s books except the two volumes of Letter To 84 Western American Literature An Imaginary Friend which are too long and concentrated to excerpt or con­ dense profitably. Working with the poet, publisher Sam Hamill has included poems left out of earlier books of collected poems in addition to including the more well known w'ork. The last section of Selected Poems 1938-1988 offers a generous selection of McGrath’snew' poems as well. Hamill has also written a masterful introduction to the volume and any review would be hard pressed to improve upon his appreciation of McGrath’s poetry/life’s work. Hamill is quick to point out McGrath’s commitment to poetry, his feeling of responsibility to it and to people, the poet’s struggle for “Justice through Love.” For indeed McGrath has been a poet without a “career,” one largely uncelebrated, certainly in the sense of New York publish­ ing and honors. Nonetheless, he has made a life’s worth of important poems, poems in the “western” tradition in its largest sense of inclusiveness and struggle. His heart and mind have aWays been with the common working man—his poems have often been political and democratic whether focusing on the politics of nations (“Ode For The American Dead In Asia”) or on the politics of poetry (“Ars Poetica: Or: Who Lives In The Ivory Tower?”) McGrath is at the same time a poet of many love poems. The early work sings of basic human...