Robinson Jeffers’ Tamar & Other Poems: A Centennial Celebration (YouTube link)
Tim Hunt, The Book Club of California, October 7, 2024:
When the California poet Robinson Jeffers published, Tamar & Other Poems, his first major collection, in 1924, it struck reviewers as both timeless and powerfully of its moment. James Rorty declared that the poems “exhibit the maturity of a remarkable talent,” and the poet Babette Deutsch confessed to feeling as “Keats professed to feel, on looking into Chapman’s Homer.” The centennial of the publication of this landmark of California literature by California’s most significant modern poet offers an occasion to revisit Tamar’s unlikely discovery (aided by, as it happens, The Book Club of California) and to explore how the making of this collection and the story of its publication can help us recover and better understand its importance in its own era, while clarifying and deepening our understanding of its relevance for our own. No figure looms larger in the history of California poetry than Jeffers, and Tamar is the collection that shows why this is so and why it matters.