Although it's evident that Rexroth's radical disaffection from the centers of official culture made the Bay Area an appealing base of operations, it's also plain that his embrace of the California hinterlands stemmed from impulses at least as elemental as ideological. An avid and delicate alertness to his adopted region's natural history, a charged responsiveness to its open sprawl and utter scale, ground the more durable passages in In What Hour, revealing backcountry affinities and reflective leanings one doesn't usually associate with hardboiled anarchists:

Autumn in California is a mild
And anonymous season, hills and valleys
Are colorless then, only the sooty green
Eucalyptus, the conifers and oaks sink deep
Into the haze; the fields are plowed, bare, waiting;
The steep pastures are tracked deep by cattle;
There are no flowers, the herbage is brittle.
All night along the coast and the mountain crests
Birds go by, murmurous, high in the warm air.
(from "Autumn in California")

Readers whose acquaintance with California isn't limited to glossy postcards of the Golden Gate or celluloid montages of Hollywood palms can attest to the Tightness of that "sooty green" and that oak-devouring haze, but one needn't be a native to be impressed by the fine-spun attention Rexroth musters for a "mild / And anonymous season" that few writers in his day (and no great number in our own) would deem worthy of more than passing notice. A Currier and Ives calendar of stock seasonal footage is next to useless in coming to terms with the muted annual cycle of the Californian countryside, and Rexroth's precedence in paying homage to this terra incognita is a credit to both his sense of nuance and his sensible knack for "making it new." The ear must shake off the echoes of intoxicating Keatsian stanzas before it can pick up the unprepossessing stateliness of this ode to autumn, and that's arguably all to the good: The ruminative texture of the above passage, the chariness toward fully ripened rhyme ("Mild"—"valleys"; "green"—"deep") and verbal dazzle ("Birds go by"), seem altogether more fitting to the hazy, colorless, and anonymous character of thelandscape under scrutiny than the chiming couplets, lush pentameters, and rapturous sprung rhythms that a verdant, dramatically transitory clime wrings from its laureates.

Rexroth had been a resident of San Francisco for more than a decade when In What Hour came off the presses. He also had some twenty years of literary industry already behind him, much of it hyperactive philosophical college and programmatic dabblings in Objectivist serialism. These experimental proclivities apparently withered as the breadlines formed and his political activism intensified, but what really seems to have brought Rexroth back from the brink of linguistic cubism was his growing intimacy with Northern California's coastal wilds and Sierra ranges. It is surely not a trifling biographical detail that Rexroth was periodically under the employ of the Federal Writers Project during these years, contributing unsigned descriptive sketches and touring squibs to such publications as the WPA Guide to California and a Field Handbook of the Sierra Nevada. These commissions had to be a happy circumstance for an enthusiast of the trail like Rexroth, and it's safe to say that the grit and dirt he picked up along the way was a decided blessing for his poetry. Amid such abstruse set pieces as "Dative Haruspices" ("Film and filament, no / Donor, gift without / Reciprocity, transparent / Tactile act, an imaginary / Web of structure sweeps / The periphery of being…") and "New Objectives, New Cadres" ("By what order must the will walk impugned, / Through spangles of landscapes, / Through umbers of sea bottom, By the casein gleam of any moon / Of postulates and wishes?") that take up considerable breathing room in his first collection, one welcomes the tempered measure that marks Rexroth's epistles from the mountains:

Frost, the color and quality of the cloud,
Lies over all the marsh below my campsite.
The wiry clumps of dwarfed white bark pines
Are smoky and indistinct in the moonlight,
Only their shadows are really visible.
The lake is immobile and holds the stars
And the peaks deep in itself without a quiver.
In the shallows the geometrical tendrils of ice
Spread their wonderful mathematics in silence.
(from "Toward an Organic Philosophy")

In the long day in the hour of small shadow
I walk on the continent's last western hill
And lie prone among the iris in the grass
My eyes fixed on the durable stone
That speaks and hears as though it were myself.
(from "A Lesson in Geography")

Lines like these assure us that Rexroth from early on was wholly conscious of casting himself as a poet in honorable regional exile, and they also affirm the elements of style that were coalescing into trustworthy habits of composition. The "outdoors" poetry of In What Hour—lean and economical in its syntax and its diction, coolly observant and solemnly meditative in its essential register, its balance of trust placed in the testimony of the senses rather than the force of rhetorical address—assumes the concentrated plainspoken form that Rexroth would avail himself of increasingly in the years to come. Implicit in this streamlined prosody is a finetuned moral sensibility. Steeped in the organic rhythms and seasonal variations of the California landscape, this is verse that divines in ecology a higher ethical order that might expunge the taint of a corrupt and corrosive social ethos. More simply, the mountaintop had become for Rexroth the most reliable place to steel the conscience and clear one's head. Here is the opening of "Hiking in the Coast Range," a poem commemorating the death of two dockworking unionists:

The skirl of the kingfisher was never
More clear than now, nor the scream of the jay
As the deer shifts her covert at a footfall;
Nor the butterfly tulip ever brighter
In the white spent wheat; nor the pain
Of a wasp stab ever an omen more sure;
The blood alternately dark and brilliant
On the blue and white bandanna pattern.

What bears out the intensity and urgency of these clean-hammered lines are their scrupulous attentiveness and inherent clarity: the balance of cadences and concentration of stresses ("white spent wheat," "omen more sure"), the taut quasi-scriptural deployment of successive negations and accumulating pivots, the deft interlocking of naturalistic and emblematic detail as the passage moves from "skirl" to "scream" to "wasp stab." This is not the voluble and splenetic poet who elsewhere confounds oracular power with oratorical volume; this is not the poet whose moral imperatives are largely indistinguishable from his imperious moods. It is the difference between grandiloquence and gravity; between a short fuse and a drawn bowstring.

Even so, "Hiking the Coast Range" is still in its own way a public poem written on the barricades. The hiker has hied to the hills to galvanize his resistance to injustice in the polis and to gird his loins for renewed class warfare. What's striking as one thumbs toward the midpoint of the Collected Shorter is the hush that falls over Rexroth's later backcountry poetry of the 1940's and 1950's, the hue and cry of causes and the outbursts of anathema fading out like crackling radio signals. In their place one hears a virtual liturgy of earthly delights and soulful gleanings, poems claiming sovereignty in what a later, blither generation of Californians would champion as the here and the now. A handful are examples of the forthright and singularly unaffected love poetry that is justly accorded a place of honor among Rexroth's more devoted readers. Initially most distinctive for an unblinkered erotic candor rarely encountered in mid-century American poetry … these amatory poems retain their boldness on the far side of the sexual revolution because they are unmuddied by either sentimentality or lubricity and unblemished by Puritan and Freudian galls alike. Up where the air is clear, Eros routs Thanatos from the field, if only for the most fleeting of interludes. As demonstrated in the exemplary "Lyell's Hypothesis Again" (Charles Lyell was the preeminent geologist of the early nineteenth century and one of the forefathers of modern geological time), Rexroth's sylvan settings are vivid environments, not allegorized Gardens, and his grasp of the material world vastly exceeds that of your average passionate shepherd:

Naked in the warm April air,
We lie under the redwoods,
In the sunny lee of a cliff.
As you kneel above me I see
Tiny red marks on your flanks
Like bites, where the redwood cones
Have pressed into your flesh.
You can find just the same marks
In the lignite in the cliff
Over our heads. Sequoia
Langsdorfii before the ice,
And sempervirens afterwards,
There is little difference,
Except for all these years.

Encountering other such poems ("Floating," "Still on Water," "When We with Sappho") that twine in a double helix around the force of nature and power of desire, we are reminded of Rexroth's admiration for the eroticized, mystical pulse of D. H. Lawrence's poetry, which he praised in his rousing 1947 introduction to the first American edition of Lawrence's Selected Poems, for achieving its visionary authority in "the pure act of sensual communion and contemplation" and reaching its highest mastery in Lawrence's explicit love poems to Frieda composed during the couple's travels along the Rhine. This cluster of lyrics, declared Rexroth in his best Poundian manner, comprise "the greatest imagistic poems ever written," capturing the romantic union of a man and woman in so primal and natural a state that "everything stands out lit by a light not of this earth and at the same time completely of this earth…." That line could serve as the epigraph for Rexroth's own intermittent poetry of spiritualized Eros and conjugal grace, his Lawrentian tendency—revealed nowhere more indelibly than in these closing lines of "Floating"—to spot the fingerprints of the divine in the couplings of humankind:

Move softly, do not move at all, but hold me,
Deep, still, deep within you, while time slides away,
As this river slides beyond this lily bed,
And the thieving moments fuse and disappear
In our mortal, timeless flesh.

Memorable though they are, Rexroth's present-tense lyrics celebrating a flesh-and-blood Other under an open sky are outnumbered by wilderness poems conceived in the absence of companionship or the aftermath of passion. Most of them take the form of soliloquies rather than direct addresses to the beloved, and they chronicle more hours spent in soulmaking than lovemaking. Much as Rexroth cherished having a mate by his side as he scaled peaks and forded brooks, the evidence of these poems lays bare an even deeper need to wrestle with body and spirit in perfect solitude. The impulse is ancient, and at this late date often wearily formulaic, yet the verse Rexroth mined on a "high plateau where / No one ever comes, beside / This lake filled with mirrored mountains" ("Time Is the Mercy of Eternity") or "On the ground beside lonely fires / Under the summer stars, and in / Cabins where the snow drifted through / The pines and over the roof ("A Living Pearl") stands out as some of the most measured and least derivative he would ever compose. While these meditations always assume a monastic distance from the madding crowd, they seldom indulge in the presumptions of holy loneliness; while they commonly incline toward mysticism, they rarely court the thin air of worldly detachment. The rituals of purification Rexroth invokes are better described as escapes into the world, revolving as they do around the pleasures of the flesh and the manifestations of place, sharply specific as they are about the passage of the seasons, the changes in the weather, the fluctuation of waters and the cycles of flowerings, the comings and goings of creatures. "Nature poetry" is almost always an enfeebling appellation, but especially so for these benedictions and baptisms written at the intersection of natural history and preternatural mystery:

Forever the thought of you,
And the splendor of the iris,
The crinkled iris petal,
The gold hairs powdered with pollen,
And the obscure cantata
Of the tangled water, and the
Burning, impassive snow peaks,
Are knotted here together.
This moment of fact and vision
Seizes immortality,
Becomes the person of this place.
The responsibility
Of love realized and beauty
Seen burns in a burning angel
Real beyond flower or stone.
(from "Incarnation")

"This moment of fact and vision"—here, in a phrase, is Rexroth's plumbline, the unit of measure by which he set about divining the limits of knowing and the depths of being as he lit out for the timberline. Yet the poems Rexroth consecrates to such moments have precious little in them of Romantic self-exaltation and sublimity: The visionary awakenings that grip this poet on his lonely summits or beside his rushing streams are specimen reaffirmations of recurrence, of continuity, of pattern, of the habitual and the diurnal, of responsibility. The "burning angel / Real beyond flower or stone" that appears in the closing lines of "Incarnation" gains all the greater purchase on reality by virtue of the fact that we are in the hands of a poet who is inordinately attentive to flowers and stones and by virtue of the fact that we have been paced through a poem that begins not in inspiration but perspiration: "Climbing alone all day long / In the blazing waste of spring snow, I came down with the sunset's edge / To the highest meadow…." The elevation of the soul and the attainment of serenity pivots not on "either/ors" but hangs in the balance between infinitely renewable "ands" and "thens."

The alpine wilderness, to be sure, was where Rexroth sought a peace surpassing all understanding, and in certain poems he enshrines his waterfalls and meadows and glades as the way stations of a pilgrim. Occasionally, they verge on ecstatic experience, glimpses behind the veil. In "The Signature of All Things" (the title poem of Rexroth's 1949 collection, named after the seminal work of the 16th-century German mystic Jacob Boehme) he lays the text aside and "gaze[s] through shade / Folded into shade of slender / Laurel trunks and leaves filled with sun" until "My own sin and trouble fall away? Like Christian's bundle." In "Time Is the Mercy of Eternity" he stares into a high-country pool upon an August evening and discerns "that the color / Of the water itself is / Due to millions of active / Green flecks of life … / The deep reverberation / Of my identity with / All this plentitude of life / Leaves me shaken and giddy." But for the most part, in transcribing his communions with nature, Rexroth succumbs neither to grandiosity nor to giddiness. The devotional integrity of his compactly built verse paragraphs derives from their implicit insistence that looking closely, speaking directly, and feeling deeply can (and perhaps must) merge into a steadfast and continuous sacramental habit of mind.

There is a rugged humility in Rexroth's readiness to be steadied by the cyclical and his willingness to be schooled by the commonplace. Observation, these poems intimate, incubates perception; description, revelation. "Although / I expect them, I walk by the / Stream and hear them splashing and / Discover them each year with / A start," he writes of a salmon migration in "Time Spirals." And again, in "Doubled Mirrors," tramping down a familiar road at night and descrying a "glinting / Everywhere from the dusty gravel," Rexroth hunkers down for a remedial seminar in wonder: "I suspect what it is / And kneel to see. Under each / Pebble and oak leaf is a / Spider, her eyes shining at / Me with my reflected light / Across immeasurable distance." The salmon spawn every year, it is an old story; the spiders proliferate under the leaf-fall at summer's end, there's nothing remarkable in it; and there is Rexroth, expecting and suspecting, lingering over his yoked moments of fact and vision as if they were a rosary.

Rexroth is never more firmly in possession of his tone and touch as when he seems to be simply marking time, nothing the hour, fixing the night sky, taking stock of what stirs around him. His finest poems of this ilk, with their delicacy and accuracy of perception, their owlishness and gravitas, their fastidious rhythms and spare syntax literally portray a man coming to his senses. What commends them—the poems and the senses—is their exemplary composure. Time and again in this poetry of the interior Rexroth cultivates keen regard where others might have lapsed into wild rapture—dedicating himself not to leaps of faith but rather, as he articulated in one of his most lovely poems, to "pauses of fate." The poem is "We Come Back," from the 1944 collection The Phoenix and the Tortoise, and it follows in its entirety:

Now, on this day of the first hundred flowers,
Fate pauses for us in imagination,
As it shall not ever in reality—
As these swifts that link endless parabolas
Change guard unseen in their secret crevices.
Other anniversaries that we have walked
Along this hillcrest through the black fir forest,
Past the abandoned farm, have been just the same—
Even the fog necklaces on the fencewires
Seem to have gained or lost hardly a jewel;
The annual and diurnal patterns hold.
Even the attrition of the cypress grove
Is slow and orderly, each year one more tree
Breaks rank and lies down, decrepit in the wind.
Each year, on summer's first luminous morning,
The swallows come back, whispering and weaving
Figure eights around the sharp curves of the swifts,
Plaiting together the summer air all day,
That the bats and owls unravel in the nights.
And we come back, the signs of time upon us,
In the pause of fate, the threading of the year.

Here, I submit, is the most telling and limpid draft of "the same poem over and over" that the elder Rexroth makes reference to at the head of "Hapax." For all its classical elegance of bearing and the formal mastery of its syllabics, it is a supplicant's poem and a sacramental incantation. For all its worldliness, it seeks meaning in provisionality and in the shedding of metaphysical conceits and moral precepts. If any poem was ever a "sheaf of stillness" it is this one: In that pause of fate an orgy of motion becomes a tapestry of eternal forces and the vernal turns autumnal as our eye works down the page. Stated baldly in "Hapax," the "ecology of infinity" is a shibboleth, a buzzline. Inscribed in the "endless parabolas" of swifts and the "fog necklaces on fencewires" that "seem to have gained or lost hardly a jewel," it's a spiritual condition made manifest and a phrase redeemed.

I don't want to give the impression that this pietistic poet of the woods and rockfaces is the "true" Rexroth or a Rexroth to be extolled at the expense of all the rest there are to go around. Nor would I venture to say that this medley of work constitutes anything so commanding as a "period" or anything as coherent as a system of thought. Notwithstanding the auspiciously titled "Toward an Organic Philosophy," one of the contemplative respites among the fiery polemics of In What Hour, this is not a poet to whom we turn for grandly mounted summas. In the years roughly spanning Pearl Harbor and the McCarthy hearings (one instinctively reaches for political watermarks when considering a muckraker of Rexroth's caliber), Rexroth's poems cover a teeming variety of subjects in a variety of forms and registers: urbane epigrams ("Me Again"), erotic homages ("A Dialogue of Watching"), memoirs bittersweet and unrepentant ("The Bad Old Days," "A Living Pearl"), playful verse for his daughters ("A Bestiary," "Mother Goose"), outright screeds (most notoriously, "Thou Shalt Not Kill," an ostensible elegy for Dylan Thomas that some adherents of incendiary anaphora hail as an ur-"Howl"), and of course, the earliest of his floodtide of Chinese and Japanese translations. But I believe these intermittent Hapaxes hold up so well precisely because they occupy an honestly-arrived-at middle ground between Rexroth's more vexed compulsions and volcanic convictions, sinning neither on the side of preachiness or aloofness. For that reason they are also some of the most humane poems from Rexroth's hand, urgent without straining after effects, serious without resorting to homiletics, thoughtful without thirsting for themes. Theirs is a versification and idiom of proportion, which in turn bears out the rectitude and the scrupulousness of the speaker's self-reflection.

What they are surely not, this group of contemplative verses occasioned by travels upcountry and downriver, are California eclogues or Sierra idylls, numbers written in honor of some idealized, half-mythical territory of honeyed light and stirring vistas. Proportion presupposes equilibrium, and the landscapes that loom so large in Rexroth's field of vision are as empirical and historical as they are archetypal and sanctified. As fleshed out in poems like "We Come Back," "Time Is the Mercy of Eternity," "Time Spirals," or "Lyell's Hypothesis Again," Rexroth's California has fewer links to the legendary island that the first European mapmakers drew or the promised land that the nineteenth-century popular imagination painted than it has ancestral ties to an innately Protestant branch of debate over the conception of nature as scripture and geography as destiny. Call him Ishmael: The deeper Rexroth penetrates into the region's lonely isolation, the more inescapably he becomes entangled in uniquely American contours of imagination and realms of spirit. However much his work asks to be understood with reference to Marx or in light of Tu Fu, however boldly his personal history carries the impress of beatnik San Francisco and beatific Kyoto, his reckonings with the wilderness bear the telltale marks of Jeffersonian and Emersonian bloodlines.

Seeking expression through nature, argued Emerson in "The Poet," "is a very high sort of seeking, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees; by sharing the path or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others." In Rexroth's backcountry poetry, California—and the so-called American Century that he waged such a holy war against—finds a glowing ember of Transcendentalism, no longer a creed or a mission but a latent aptitude for, in Emerson's words again, "the condition of true naming … resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes through forms…." Wherever else Rexroth's long and winding paper trail leads us, it also runs through the vicinity of Concord, and that is where, just now, this reader would like to leave him:

Deer are stamping in the glades,
Under the full July moon.
There is a smell of dry grass
In the air, and more faintly,
The scent of a far off skunk.
As I stand at the wood's edge,
Watching the darkness, listening
To the stillness, a small owl
Comes to the branch above me,
On wings more still than my breath.