There is perhaps no work in which Jeffers lets the reader into his private mind as much as he does in the hybrid poem Hungerfield. He has lost his love, and he begins to rationalize ways of defining her as extant. He uses General Relativity to establish that she still exists in spacetime. Ultimately, however, he abandons this conceptualizing and confesses that she is gone.

The poem then transitions into a short narrative about the futility of battling with death. Even in the fictional case where a man defeats death in one personal battle, death pushes forward on other fronts and eventually wins the war. A creative, engaging, and timely tale.

Geographically, Hungerfield enjoys a special “place” in Jeffers’ catalog in that the poem extended “Jeffers Country” south down the Big Sur coast, though the geography of the poem is largely fictional. A couple of place names in the poem, Horse Creek and Granite Point, were introduced into the geography of the poem by Jeffers. The poet had so introduced other place names on other occasions.

Hungerfield has been included only in Jeffers anthologies:

• The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers, 2003; ed. Albert Gelpi
• The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Stanford, 2001; ed. Tim Hunt
• Rock and Hawk: A Selection of Shorter Poems by Robinson Jeffers Random House, 1987, ed. Robert Hass