The Blue Pencil

In This Wild Water: The Suppressed Poems of Robinson Jeffers By James Shebl Ward Ritchie Press, 123 pp., $9.95 This would have been a hot book 25 years ago. Close your eyes and see: Bennett Cerf testy, Robinson Jeffers projecting a carven silence, six Random House attorneys conferring on a statement, Mike Wallace salivating. In 1977 it’s just a botch, unless you’re enough of an Ansel Adams fan to forgive all for the sumptuous four-color jacket.

Mr. Shebl alleges that Random House (prolonged boos) forced the suppression of ten poems from Jeffers’ 1948 volume The Double Axe and Other Poems; further, that the suppressed poems do finally make explicit what Jeffers thought about the cosmos. Your reward for hard work with Mr. Shebl’s prose is to learn that neither allegation is sustained.

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Hugh Kenner

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In This Wild Water: The Suppressed Poems of Robinson Jeffers By James Shebl Ward Ritchie Press, 123 pp., $9.95 This would have been a hot book 25 years ago. Close your eyes and see: Bennett Cerf testy, Robinson Jeffers projecting a carven silence, six Random House attorneys conferring on a statement, Mike Wallace salivating. In 1977 it’s just a botch, unless you’re enough of an Ansel Adams fan to forgive all for the sumptuous four-color jacket.

Mr. Shebl alleges that Random House (prolonged boos) forced the suppression of ten poems from Jeffers’ 1948 volume The Double Axe and Other Poems; further, that the suppressed poems do finally make explicit what Jeffers thought about the cosmos. Your reward for hard work with Mr. Shebl’s prose is to learn that neither allegation is sustained.