Brother to Boulders

HUNGERFIELD AND OTHER POEMS (115 pp.)--Robinson Jeffers--Random House ($3).

In a stone tower overlooking the Pacific, aging (67) Poet Robinson Jeffers mourns for his wife, who died in 1950, sings the glories of nature, and waits for the peace that is death. There are still plenty of Jeffers admirers who would not hesitate to proclaim him the greatest living U.S. poet. The qualities they have liked in him--his violence, his darkly unrelenting, tragic view of human existence, his lines surging with the momentum of Pacific rollers--are all present in Hunger-field, his first book in five years. But they are echoes now. Writes Jeffers in the last poem of the book: "I am growing old, that is the trouble." Even as echoes, Jeffers' themes and poetic voice can still provoke and disturb.

He moves among death, violence and pessimism as naturally as other poets celebrate love and ecstasy. In Hungerfield, the title poem addressed to his wife, Hawl Hungerfield's mother lies in a California ranch house dying of cancer. Big, powerful Hawl sits beside her waiting for Death to claim her so that he can grapple with him and beat him off, as Hawl did once in World War I when badly wounded. Death enters and Hungerfield does beat him off, but the reprieved woman, who has been begging for Death, is displeased. Vengefully she accuses Hawl's wife of adultery, later tries to send Hawl and herself over a cliff as he drives her home.

On their arrival, Hawl finds his wife and son drowned, kills his brother for failing to save them, then burns the house down over them all. To his mother, who says, "Hawl . . . kill me before I burn," he replies: "Find a knife for yourself." With obvious Jeffersian irony, the poet allows her to escape and live. Hungerfield hardly proves a favorite Jeffers point--"There is no consolation in humanity"--but he avoids satisfactory motivations for his piled-up horrors by intoning: It is thus (and will be} that violence Turns on itself, and builds on the wreck of violence its violent beauty, the spring fire-fountain And final peace , . .

In The Cretan Woman, a short verse play based on Euripides' Hippolytus, Jeffers has adapted a situation made to his order. The wife of Theseus falls in love with Hippolytus, her homosexual stepson.

When he spurns her, she falsely accuses him of raping her, then stands by as his father disembowels him. Jeffers lets the Goddess Aphrodite have the last word: We are not extremely sorry for the woes of men.

We laugh in heaven . . .

Let them beware. Something is lurking hidden.

There is always a knife in the flowers.

There is always a lion just beyond the firelight.

Poet Jeffers is a grave, courteous man whom a good friend once described as being "cold to the human species." For more than 40 years he has lived at Carmel. Calif, in a house made, largely with his own hands, of stones rolled up from the shore below. Only in recent years has he allowed himself a telephone and electric lighting; long ago he planted thousands of trees to guard his privacy from encroaching civilization. Optimists, those who put their faith in humanity, believers in God, in fact most people, will find little comfort anywhere in Jeffers' work. Even now, an only slightly mellowed grandfather, he holds unshaken to his own credo. Never has he stated the essence of it more clearly than he does now in The Old Stonemason, one of the short poems in Hungerfield:

I must not even pretend To be one of the people. I must stand

here Alone with open eyes in the clear air

growing old,

Watching with interest and only a little nausea . . . The old granite stones, those are

my people; Hard heads and stiff wits but faithful,

not fools, not chatterers; And the place where they stand today they will stand also tomorrow.

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