Books: Harrowed Marrow

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Life, a hawk hanging in California's stainless sky, stares down on Life, a ground-squirrel crouching on California's sun-bleached desert hills. When the squirrel begins to tremble, when the trembling reaches the marrow of his consciousness, the hawk swoops. After stripping off the flesh, he cracks the bones, sucks the trembling conscious marrow out. Fed with consciousness, his essential bread, the hawk returns to the stainless sky, hangs waiting for the ground-squirrel's son, their sons, their sons. . . .

Reave Thurso, with his mother and lamed brother Mark, lives on the coastal farm left by his father who killed himself when he could not make it pay. His limestone quarry buildings lie in decay; only a rusty cable, stretched across the canyon over the farm, hums in the air in memory of him.

Thurso's wife, Helen, fears him more than she loves him, hates his destructive will that is irreversible as the tide. After a deer-killing she runs off with Thurso's friend, Rick Armstrong, and hides successfully for a year. When Thurso tracks her down she goes off with him quickly, to save a meeting between, him and her lover. On the way home Thurso pretends to break down the car, waits in the desert for Armstrong's pursuit. But Armstrong does not pursue; all Thurso can kill is a lizard that rambles by.

Home again, Helen finds it more dreadful than ever. Thurso's mother hates her, watches her like a hawk. Between lust for Helen and visions of his father's ghost, Mark begins to go mad. To remove all trace of his father's memory, Thurso cuts clown the humming cable, is cut down himself. Hopelessly crippled, in ceaseless agony, he hangs on to suffering and life. Helen, who hated Thurso for his irreversible will, now loves him for it. In mercy she tries to put him out of his torment, but he will not allow her. After nis crazed brother hangs himself, Thurso gets Helen to cart him, sodden with pain, up to a sea promontory. There, in a quarry shed, she surprises him with kisses, cuts his throat. When the old mother comes up the hill she finds Helen poisoned, dying. She has eaten the contraceptive pills she used to prevent more life. The old mother, too tough herself for any hawk's beak to tear, is left squatting on her sorrows as on a pile of cracked and pithless bones. . . .

Such is the theme, such the characters, of a new poem by Robinson Jeffers, whom a considerable public now considers the most impressive poet the U. S. has yet produced.†

Eyrie. Hard by the Pacific surfline at Carmel, Calif, stands a tower of grey

Santa Lucia granite, seaworn boulders rolled up from the shore and heaved into place by Poet Jeffers for his own perch. For several years the stones rose in their courses; as they began to invade the upper air, a hawk dropped down to haunt them. Now Hawk Tower stands 30 ft. high; in its turreted top is a socket to hold a flag pole to flaunt a flag, though neither hawks nor Poet Jeffers favor flapping flags.