SOURCE: "Huge Pits of Darkness, High Peaks of Light," in New Yorker, Vol. LXIV, No. 45, December 26, 1988, pp. 91-5.

In the following review of Rock and Hawk, Vendler provides an overview of Jeffers's career, concluding Jeffers "will remain a notable but minor poet. "

The poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) is periodically resurrected. Stanford University Press is bringing out his complete poems in four sumptuous volumes; and from the ashes of The Selected Poetry (1938), compiled by Jeffers himself, and of a second selection, compiled in 1965 by anonymous editors at Random House, there now arises a third, Rock and Hawk (Random House), selected by the Californian poet Robert Hass. Jeffers' own Selected ran to six hundred and twenty-two pages, the second to a hundred and eleven, and the new one—handsomely produced—is two hundred and ninety pages long and contains over a hundred short poems. Hass has dropped Jeffers' swollen narrative...