Voices of the Headland

Alan J. Malnar, Associate Professor of Humanities and Communications at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, teaches courses in writing, literature, film, and cultural studies. He has published articles in both scholarly and serial periodicals, and has received many national leadership awards from the Associated Collegiate Press for his work with Horizons newspaper. Voices of the Headland: Robinson Jeffers and the Bird of Prey is his first full-length publication.

Voices of the Headland: Robinson Jeffers and the Bird of Prey explores the image of the raptor in the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Emanating from the continent's end of the American West, Jeffers' poetic eagles, hawks, falcons, vultures, and other birds of prey symbolize the compelling presence and voice of nature, a pantheistic universe of beauty and splendor, death and destruction. It is the perilous bird of prey which calls forth the very essence and life-force of Jeffers himself, winging its way through his expansive body of narrative and lyrical verse, a poetry fundamentally anti-social in its vision and primitive in its basic, instinctual surge. Voices of the Headland examines this distinctive imagery from many critical viewpoints.

Voices of the Headland: Robinson Jeffers and the Bird of Prey explores the image of the raptor in the poetry of Robinson Jeffers.

List of Illustrations - Peter Quigley: Foreword - Author's Preface - Credits and Acknowledgements - List of Abbreviations - Introduction: Solitary Hunters - Critical Viewpoints - Words of Prey - Of Flight & Sky - The Hawks of Jeffers Country - A Natural History of Hawks - The Hawk's Dream - The King and His Hawks - Beasts in Peril - Merciless Cries - The Hawk Poet of the Tower - Bibliography - Index.