Poem of the Week of 15-Feb-04: Bixby's Landing

Too many times Robinson Jeffers turns his poems into philosophical treatises on nature, his views of inhumanism and the stark permanence of nature beyond the interpretation of human consciousness. But when he doesn't his language is crystalline, his thought sublime. I think Bixby's Landing is one of these. There's a little telling, and the telling that there is is simple and beautiful. The showing, though, is a triumph of of a clear eye.