Hawk-eye

GIVE YOUR HEART TO THE HAWKS-- Robinson Jeffers--Random House ($2.50). Other things come from California besides sun-kissed athletes and sun-kissed fruit. One thing is Robinson Jeffers' poetry, which is not noticeably drenched in California's private sun. A gloomy poet if there ever was one. and like most moderns much possessed by death. Jeffers seems even to his enthusiasts like his description of the mountain coast he inhabits : . . . precipitous, dark-natured, beautiful; without humor, without ever

A glimmer of gayety; blind gray headland and arid mountain, and trailing from his shoulders the infinite ocean. Poet Jeffers likes lengthy poems in which his long-limbed lines have room to move, but he sometimes cramps himself into briefer limits. In his latest collection he includes 24 short poems, three long ones.

The title poem, like many a Jeffers narrative, starts off in realistic-novel style, plods up into high but hellish places where the wind blows too strong for realism. On a drunken picnic at the seashore Lance caught his brother Michael making love to his wife Fayne: in an instant he had killed Michael. Next instant he regretted it: and if quick-witted Fayne had not made it seem an accident, the murder had been out. To keep the truth from killing his mother, and to save Lance. Fayne persuaded him not to confess what he had done. But his atonement was too much for him: she saw him going slowly mad before her eyes. When at last he threw himself over a cliff Fayne was not surprised, would not let herself follow him because she was growing big with his child.

Few modern writers have expressed more coherently than Jeffers the sickness of the century:

He answered. "I am sick of life. I have beaten at the last door

And found a fool."

No respecter of men, with no fellow-feel-ing for God. Poet Jeffers takes poetry with deadly seriousness, doffs his hat to Science, ''new Russia" and

The poet, who wishes not to play games with words, His affair being to awake dangerous images And call the hawks;--they all feed the flit tire, they serve God, Who is very beautiful, but hardly a friend of humanity.

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