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Reviews of the new edition
“After The Waste Land and the early Cantos of Pound, or perhaps Marianne Moore's Poems, Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems was the second or third shock of modernist aesthetics to transform American poetry. This edition is the perfect way to recover that shock and its energy for a new generation of readers.”
-Robert Hass
“One can't fully understand the force and originality of Robinson Jeffers' poetry until one sees his lines laid out exactly as they were written without the line breaks made necessary by commercial formats. I remember the startling clarity I experienced when I saw William Everson's Granite and Cypress. The new Tor House Press edition of Roan Stallion, Tamar & Other Poems makes it possible to see (as well as hear) the strange, tragic music that made Jeffers famous. I can't think of a better way to celebrate the centennial of Roan Stallion than to allow us to see the texts, clear and unbent, for the first time.”
-Dana Gioia
“The publication of the Roan Stallion/Tamar volume a century ago was a major event in American letters. It not only announced the arrival of a major poet, and a poet from the west far from, the eastern establishment; it also proclaimed and enacted a poetics antithetical to the modernist poetics of Pound and Williams. A different sense of poetic form, but also, more essentially, a different sense of the sources and ends of poetry. The wide format of William Everson’s hand press volume of Granite and Cypress some years ago was a revelation because it released Jeffers’ free verse line to run with full sweep and force without line-breaks. This centennial edition of Jeffers’ breakthrough volume gives us the poems at last in their full form.”
- Albert Gelpi
“The landscape format of the Centennial edition of Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems restores Jeffers’ lines to their intended length and original cadence. I did not know it was possible to make this verse seem wilder and bolder. This new version of Robinson Jeffers’ central achievement renews the question of the poet with contemporary force—what is our place in nature?”
- Katie Peterson