[In the following essay, Lensing offers a negative review of The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead, and Mercy.]

When James Dickey's Poems 1957-1967 appeared three years ago, the poet found himself suddenly promoted to the front ranks of American versifiers: Louis Untermeyer described the volume as the “outstanding collection of one man's poems to appear in this decade,” while Peter Davison suggested that Dickey might well nudge his way onto the niche of eminence with Robert Lowell as a “major” poet. Dickey's next volume, therefore, has been awaited with some anticipation, and The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy, it seems to me, does not forcibly advance his reputation.

Dickey's power as a poet has depended upon a fairly repetitive technique: a human psyche is situated in some natural setting and proceeds surrealistically toward a metaphorical merger with any of various forms of plant, animal or human life. The process is always accompanied by an accumulative verbal intensity and excitement. As Dickey himself has said of his own work, “I meant to try to get a fusion of inner and outer states, of dream, fantasy and illusion where everything partakes of the protagonist's mental processes and creates a single impression.” Most of the poems in the new volume are projections of this technique.

I would suggest, however, two reasons why Dickey's newer poems do not reach the mark of some of his earlier work. The energizing power of Dickey's language has always depended upon the free flow of successive participial and gerund phrases, long, loose lines, frequently run-on: the effect must be accumulative. One poem in the new volume, “In the Pocket,” describes a game of football phatasmagorically reenacted. The poem's crescendo builds toward the conclusion:

                              … throw it hit him in the middle
                    Of his enemies          hit move scramble
                         Before death and the ground
Come up          LEAP STAND KILL DIE STRIKE
                              Now.

The failure lies in the excessive dependence on upper-case letters, verbal arrangement on the page, and a weak anticlimactic redundancy with the terminal adverb. In short, verbal power has succumbed to artificial gimmickry.

Secondly, and perhaps more pervasive, the focus of a number of these poems is blurred by a tendency toward verbosity and overstatement. “Turning Away” and “Pine” are examples of poems too discursive to sustain interest. Part of this is the result of the almost total prose-like effect of many of these poems: Dickey has moved far away indeed from the anapestic cadences of his earlier poems. The poet himself seems to sense the nature of the problem by his insertion of a marginal gloss in “The Eye-Beaters” or a brief plot-summary epigraph in “Madness.”

These weaknesses do not obscure Dickey's continuing power as a poet—though The Eye-Beaters, etc. seems to me a falling off from the success of Buckdancer's Choice and the preceding volumes. One poem, “The Eye-Beaters,” reminiscent of the earlier “The Owl King,” describes blind children whose hands are tied to prevent their striking their eyes in angry frustration. Though flawed by discursiveness and a trite conclusion, the poem is a powerful statement. Finally, no one expects Dickey to be able to sustain through every poem the authentic lyric force of poems like “The Lifeguard” and “Hunting Civil War Relics at Nimblewill Creek.” The nature of his poetry is such that it demands strong emotive risks, but it should be undertaken with acute consciousness of the dangers along the way.