SOURCE: Van Ness, Gordon. “Other Prose: Jericho, God's Images, Wayfarer, and Southern Light.” In Outbelieving Existence: The Measured Motion of James Dickey, pp. 101-11. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House. 1992.

[In the following essay, Van Ness surveys the central thematic concerns of and the critical reaction to Dickey's nonfiction.]

In a 1974 article discussing his efforts and those of painter Hubert Shuptrine to produce a major book about the South, Dickey declares,

I want to write how it feels to be in this place, the South. The essence of it. The mood of it. How it feels to be there on the coast … to go there today and stand looking out over the marshes. And why it feels that way. Every place has its own quality of strangeness. Which is really uniqueness. That's what we want to capture. In paintings and words. The feeling of places.

(Logue 186)

Jericho: The South Beheld (1974), the book that resulted from the project initiated by Southern Living, was a commercial success and a critical failure. Following the publication in 1970 of The Eye-Beaters, Deliverance, and Self-Interviews, a book where Dickey examines his own life and poetry, he issued Sorties the following year, which contains his journals and several essays. All were intended for a scholarly audience. Critics consider The Eye-Beaters, published by Doubleday, and Deliverance, issued by Houghton Mifflin, major works, and Self-Interviews and Sorties, both by Doubleday, significantly address Dickey's own career as well as the contemporary literary scene in general. However, Jericho and God's Images (1977), published by Oxmoor House, the book division of The Progressive Farmer Company, are oversized books in which Dickey combines his writing with illustrations for a collector's edition market. Later volumes in the seventies also reveal Dickey's interest in this specialized audience: The Enemy from Eden (Lord Jim Press), The Owl King (Red Angel Press), In Pursuit of the Grey Soul (Bruccoli-Clark Press), and Head-Deep in Strange Sounds (Palaemon Press). These small publishing companies, often concerned with luxury editions, appealed to a less scholarly market than Dickey's major works.

Bowers-Martin (1984) sees the books published in the mid-seventies as transitional in Dickey's career. The Zodiac (1976) culminates his exploration of “transcendence through the idiom of the creative lie” (144), which constitutes his central thematic concern. Its “exaggerated horizontal shape” (144) suggests the large coffee-table books that immediately precede and follow it. Moreover, like The Zodiac, based on Barnouw's translation, Jericho and God's Images derive from other sources, the former from traditional Southern culture and the latter from the Bible. Yet The Zodiac, while logically grouped with Dickey's serious poetry because of its theme, also evidences the poet's interest in a specialized market. The poem's working manuscript was sectioned and bound into special-edition volumes; these Bruccoli-Clark collector editions were then sold by private subscription at ＄400 per book. Bowers-Martin, noting the specialized market intended by Jericho and God's Images, declares that neither book denies Dickey's theme of transcendence, but they explain the drastic turn in his publishing history. During the seventies Dickey failed to discover subjects and themes around which to create a new experimental poetry. Because The Zodiac concludes the poetic idiom he had been exploring, his inability to depict transcendence through a new technique led to Jericho and God's Images, which are “attempts to get extra mileage from what has worked before” (145).

Yet Jericho is only partly successful because Dickey fails to use “the main sources of his power” (145), including his own artistic control of the transcendent experience. In the introduction the poet asks the reader to become a “beholder,” someone who can

enter into objects and people and places with the sense of these things entering into him. What starts out as a deliberate act of attention ends as though he were not so much performing a rendition of Reality, but that a living action were being perpetrated on him.

While this approach poetically succeeds with “The Beholders” in Falling by fusing the personae and their surroundings, the implication in Jericho is that Dickey himself cannot impart “that energy, that transcendence” (145), particularly when he asks the reader to provide the imaginative vision requisite for such a fusion of inner and outer states: “You, reader, must open up until you reach the point … of sensing your locality pour into you simultaneously through every sense.” Dickey additionally eliminates the need for the creative lie, the very means by which he has previously provided transcendency and thereby given the reader, for example, a sheep child, two young lovers living in the mist around their wrecked motorcycle, a stewardess who lives only as she prepares to die, and blind children who attempt to see the origins of the race. In Jericho he takes traditional stories and asks the reader to view them in a heightened manner, an approach which undercuts his ability to lie creatively.

Dickey uses the persona of a seabird to view the South as the Promised Land. While hovering, swooping, or changing forms, the bird becomes whatever is necessary for each experience, but it always remains the same narrator, accompanying the reader in a series of “flickers.” These experiences combine with actual landings as the bird touches Southern soil, a technique anticipated by the book's epigraph from Joshua: “Loose thy shoe from off thy foot; for the place whereon thou standest is holy.” The first flicker occurs at St. Augustine, the South's oldest city, when the persona notices an oyster shell. Its condition, Bowers-Martin declares, establishes an important element in Dickey's fusion—the union of the natural and man-made worlds (146). Observing the shell, the bird says: “It is not lying on a beach, half-embedded in sand, but is jutting from a wall at an angle it never had in the sea.” Such a conjunction is often repeated, as when the seabird flickers to Mobile's gardens: “No matter how close to them we are, no matter whether we help them grow or kill them, they are forever beyond us, these flowers.” Southerners themselves exhibit this dichotomy in the way they lead their lives, partly grounded in their past dependence on the land and partly lived in an increasingly industrialized future.

Jericho concludes with a warning about the frailty of this fusion on which the new South rests. In Birmingham, Vulcan, the god of steel who provides the foundation for the Promised Land, says to the bird and the reader, “All this hardware I make: well, don't tell those new high-rising buildings of Jericho I told you; men used to call me Mulciber. You know what that means? The softener. They might get jittery. I might fall off this hill.” Bowers-Martin believes this ending flicker reveals the elements of danger, repose, and joy that he also attempts to incarnate in his poems (147). Yet following these flickers, Dickey withdraws, leaving his audience to unify the experiences themselves: “Come down, reader, and be whole here.”

Yardley's (1974) criticism seeks to define the larger nature of Jericho, asking whether the book is art or literature or “anything more than a colossal instrument” (43). Shuptrine's drawings are skillful, but they are also “imitative and sentimental” (43); Dickey's language “rolls” (43). Yet Jericho offers only a “sanitized and idealized” (43) South. Tailored to accommodate the readers of Southern Living, it is a book “for regional chauvinists to wallow in” (43), honoring only those qualities that affirm the Southern myth and ignoring those aspects that do not.

Critics quickly observed the extensive promotional campaign that accompanied the book's publication and which stressed not simply its size and Southern focus but also the magnitude of the sales effort. As Yardley does, they just as quickly faulted the content of Jericho. Evans (1975), for example, notes the book's big size (12 1/2 by 16 inches) and weight (7 pounds), its large first printing (150,000 numbered copies), and its extensive press release, which announced that the printing of Jericho required “28 carloads (one million pounds) of paper and 31 miles of cloth” (4). Such commercialism suggests “the poet decided to give himself over to the Alabama Chamber of Commerce” (4). Jones (1976) details the successful marketing strategy and campaign, arguing that the book's commercial popularity owes not only to the thorough testing and execution of a direct-mail campaign and the intense regional pride of Southerners but also to a national trend for nostalgia and a return to the land (250). Yet Evans, conceding that Jericho captures the South's haunted sense of pride and defeat, sees the failure to mention the Negro struggle for freedom as a major omission. Rather than presenting the civil rights movement, the book captures “the South that white Southerners think they live in” (4). Evans does acknowledge Dickey's awareness of the racial problem, citing his 1961 essay “Notes on the Decline of Courage.” There he describes the black struggle as

pointing up as nothing else in this country has ever done before, the fearful consequences of systematic and heedless oppression for both the oppressed and the oppressor, who cannot continue to bear such a burden without becoming himself diminished, and in the end debased, by such secret and cruel ways. … It is not too much to say that in the “Negro problem” lies the problem of the South itself.

(Babel 258-59)

Later in Self-Interviews Dickey also states, “One must not be coerced … into writing about nothing but contemporary events; the larger forms of nature are still there. Not only the Watts and Washington riots exist, but the universe exists as well” (70). Dickey consequently is on “defensible ground” (5), Evans believes, when choosing those experiences that move or interest him, but Jericho is “an interpretative history” (5) whose announced theme is “The South Beheld.” That such a book omits the civil rights movement, therefore, “shouts with Dickey's silence” (5). Furthermore, he omits discussion of the decline of Southern values and specifically the region's new homogeneity. The book's commercial success, despite these flaws, owes to the attitude it promulgates, a nostalgia that confirms the white Southerner's view of himself as a citizen in the Promised Land. It assures him that he lives in “a white paradise without any recognition of a paradise lost” (5).

Lacking such a pronounced political focus, Donald's (1975) lengthy review challenges the use of the word “collaboration” to describe the Shuptrine-Dickey relationship since each traveled his own way through the South by different means and recorded what each thought significant. As Dickey writes, “We have made no attempt in this book to have paintings and words coincide.” Donald notes that, beside the obvious differences in their portrayals, one visual and the other verbal, Shuptrine views the heart of the South as the mountains, particularly those of North Carolina, since over one-third of his paintings derive from these and another one-third from the adjacent states of Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina (185). Dickey's scope is larger, “fourteen or so states,” he writes, asking the reader to follow in

a gigantic spiral, going … first along the Gulf Coast, through the bayous and over the Delta and the Great River, then into the huge and bewildering and heartening blue of West Texas, then north to Arkansas, through Kentucky and West Virginia and Virginia, briefly down to the South Carolina coast … through Appalachia into Atlanta.

While Shuptrine's artistic focus is the countryside and country people, Dickey concentrates on small-town life. As Dickey himself remarks, Shuptrine is an artist “struck by things,” while he himself excels not so much with the trees, dogs, and dwellings of the South as with its people—the faith healer, the bank robber, and the mill woman. Yet Donald believes both artists share a common vision of the South as the Promised Land. Within their respective mediums, what appears is their love of the land and the sense that the idealized Southern life they present is dying or already dead. While containing humor, Dickey's language is “elegiac” (186), and his rhetoric, while celebrating the South, has “a dying fall” (186). These characteristics appear, for example, when he depicts the owner of a garden of azaleas: “He stands with both hands in the time-shade, bowed down with his money, exhausted with the income and upkeep of ancient Jericho, with the expense, the overhead of flowers, of old ladies fainting with vegetative rapture.” Dickey more directly suggests the decline of the Old South when he writes: “This is a land of ghosts, and we feel nowhere come-truer than in a cemetery.” Shuptrine's paintings express the same mood, the same sense of “a world in its final autumn” (186). Therefore, Jericho is not so much “a preview of the Promised Land but a nostalgic glance at Paradise Lost” (187).

Steadman (1975) faults Jericho both for artistic reasons and for its overstated assertion. While the text exhibits virtues of vitality, strong imagery, and a “sensual immediacy” (9), it nevertheless reveals a lessening of the intensity and sense of abandon that characterizes Dickey's poetry. Though Shuptrine's watercolors remarkably mirror Dickey's style, their concentration and emphasis on detail occasionally resulting in realism or something beyond realism, his paintings “do not penetrate beneath the visual to provide any deeper meaning” (9). Yet the book's principal danger lies in the reader believing Jericho more than it is, a problem Dickey compounds in his introduction by calling it “two deep views of Jericho, that will not come—or come together—again.” The title, together with his statement that he and Shuptrine have “beheld” the South and offerred it with a “Biblical intensity,” suggests that Jericho mythologizes the region more than it actually does. Dickey writes that the “landscapes, seascapes, mountains, rivers and people … are our significance.” However, the book fails both to depict the South's inextricable relationship with the past and, more importantly, to “cohere into a larger, expansive theme” (9).

More recent criticism, however, views Jericho as both a creative achievement and a product of Dickey's business acumen. Calhoun and Hill (1983) acknowledge Dickey's turn from his proclaimed mission as poet to a prose work intended for a popular audience and offerred by small publishing houses concentrating exclusively on luxury editions. The focus suggests either that Dickey was unable to explore familiar themes in creatively new poetry or that he could not finish Alnilam. The novel was finally published in 1987, but he had originally titled it Death's Baby Machine and detailed certain of its scenes as early as Sorties (1971). Yet this new direction also reveals Dickey's capacity “to ‘make connections’ with different kinds of readers” (121), showing many of the motifs previously apparent in his poetry, fiction, and criticism. Jericho depicts Dickey's Southern heritage, his ability to see clearly and poetically the details of the Southern landscape, and his “Agrarian love of the land” (121). The major change dictated by the new popular audience is Dickey's abandonment of “his role of poet of the expansive imagination” (121). No longer does he compel belief in situations and personae beyond the commonplace; rather, the reader assumes the imaginative task, instructed by Dickey to go “deeply into human life … of our particular segment of the world and what it offers … to those familiar with it by birth … and those who come to the South as strangers.” Perhaps because of the reversal of previously expected poet-reader roles, as well as the absence of the usual Dickey persona, Jericho succeeds only in parts; good images and inescapable scenes occur only infrequently. Calhoun and Hill additionally note the quantity of literary allusions, including ones to John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson as well as echoes of Dickey's own poems, a fact especially surprising since Dickey remains critical of “academicism” (122).

Like Jericho, God's Images (1977) has attracted almost no lengthy, critical study. Reviews were mixed, and later critics compare it unfavorably to Jericho. Less ambitious in size, though not in artistic intent, it contains fifty-three prose-poems that not so much re-interpret as re-present particular Biblical texts from individual perspectives. A similar number of etchings by Marvin Hayes accompany these re-presentations. Marty (1977) believes Dickey's text faithful in intent to the Biblical motifs it depicts, but while some passages are rich, others become too poetically sensual. Hayes's drawings, at once technical and imaginative, combine the literal with the visionary. When both artists “aspire least they accomplish most” (13). DeCandido (1978), however, considers Dickey's passages “oddly secular” (154), stating that they lack a “palpable spirituality” (154) because the emphasis shifts from God to the figures that present the Biblical story, characters moreover that are “predominantly masculine” (154). Admitting the prose is crafted and deeply felt, the review strikes a feminist approach, noting the absence of Judith, Esther, and Mary Magdalene from the portrayals and observing that Ruth and Mary are only “shadow and symbol” (154). God's Images narrows the Bible to “the worldly visions of two men” (154), a comment which ignores Dickey's own statements in the book's foreword:

To an artist such as Marvin Hayes, or to a poet, such as I hold myself to be, these images have unfolded in us by means of the arts we practice. These are our images of God's Images. … These then, in this book, are some of the images from the inner kingdoms of two men. … Hayes and I do not wish to supercede or in any way substitute our interpretations of the Bible for yours. These are crucial to you, and therefore vital and living. We should like to think, though, that we may be able to give an added dimension to your own inner Bible and enrich your personal kingdom of God, there where it lies forever … within you.

DeCandido fails to give Dickey the choice of his material.

Other reviews, however, were not influenced by political correctness. Publishers Weekly (1977), for example, states that Dickey's imaginatively subjective prose complements the etchings, which blend “realism with a disciplined sense of formal beauty” (Johnston 63). The reviewer notes the sincerity of both artists, particularly Dickey, whose effort was compelled by the death of his first wife, Maxine Syerson, a fact the poet acknowledges in the foreword: “She was all her life a devoted dweller in the Bible, and now, through the flowering tomb, she resides among the superhuman reality of God's images.” Booklist (1977) and American Artist (1977) similarly see the collaborative interpretations of Dickey and Hayes as felicitous. The former asserts that Hayes's strength lies not only in his innovative approach to depicting well-known stories (the Crucifixion, for example, is shown as a reflection in Mary's tearing eye) but also in “the grace and economy of their realization” (344). Dickey lends this artistic interpretation an “emotional accompaniment” (344), often assuming the voice of the person he depicts, a technique which poetically reflects upon the visual meaning. This collaboration, American Artist observes, effects “a significant religious contribution for modern readers” (Preiss 26).

Oxmoor House, anticipating possible controversy from the book's unusual perspectives, established an advisory board of Biblical scholars, both Jewish and Christian, to assure that the portrayals were faithful to scriptural materials. Despite the offense taken by DeCandido, Christian Century (1977) sees God's Images favorably. Hayes's etchings bring a “new comprehension of biblical ideas” (1173), and Dickey's prose, “florid and reverent at once” (1173), reinforces the themes. Writing in Theology Today, Dillenberger (1979) raises questions about a literary work that depicts a religious subject. Hayes's etchings offer a series of select, dramatized vignettes, literally presented but without a comprehensive understanding of the Bible. Lacking such a unified overview, both artist and poet substitute piety. The illustrations sometimes evoke the theology of the sixties, as when in “Second Coming,” Jesus becomes a tiny figure walking through a wide field of flowers. The “Crucifixion” has bathos, not pathos, although others like the “Death of Absalom” effectively present “the small, enclosed, compressed image which operates visually much as the epigram does verbally” (509). Many pictures, moreover, reveal an evasiveness about sexuality, with the figures seeming either castrated or purposely sexless, a troubling tendency since other sketches reflect the decade's more liberal attitudes. Too often, Dickey's prose passages must explain the disparity between the picture and the Scripture which accompanies it, breaching the incompatibility as if the poet's role were interpretive. Dillenberger questions the relevancy of the panel of church experts whose names and credentials are listed in the frontmatter, suggesting instead a group of advisors from art and literature, because God's Images is literary, not theological, in its focus.

Calhoun and Hill (1983) view God's Images as more academic than Jericho because within Dickey's text lie the voices of Milton, Blake, and the translators of the King James Bible, not just certain past and present Southern poets. However, the varied narrations undermine the “conversational vigor” (122) inherent in a work with only a single narrator. Moreover, unlike Jericho, God's Images has no unifying thesis. Rather than trying to justify the ways of God to man, Dickey attempts to rework the images in his own poetic idiom. Trying to recover the common, unrecognized culture within his readers, however, Dickey actualizes Biblical images that, as he writes in the foreword, are “buried and live in us.” While the poet in Jericho seeks to establish a shared Southern connection between poet and painter on the one hand and artists and their readers on the other, he endeavors in God's Images to broaden this intent to include Protestantism. Because of such purposes, both books become more than mere commercial enterprises.

Bowers-Martin (1984) extensively examines God's Images, both as it compares specifically to Jericho and more generally to Dickey's major themes and artistic techniques. Unlike Calhoun and Hill, she sees these books as a decided retreat from previous efforts. Dickey eliminates the need for the creative lie by randomly presenting stories with which the reader already is familiar and admitting in the foreword: “We all have our images of God, given to us by the Bible, which is the Word of God. These images are ours, and in calling them up in our minds we are living witnesses of the fact that ‘the kingdom of God is within you.’” Yet in believing that his interpretation of the reader's personal images will engender a heightened understanding of each Biblical story, Dickey relies not on his own creativity but rather these preexisting stories. The fusion of the reader's inner state with the larger Kingdom of God, therefore, lies not with the poet but with his audience. Moreover, unlike the earlier book, God's Images lacks a unifying narrative voice; the episodes remain fragmented. In such poems as “The Sheep Child,” “May Day Sermon,” “Falling,” and “Madness,” the strong narrative voice compels belief by combining first-person immediacy with third-person objectivity, but Dickey now resorts “to whatever voice strikes him” (148). Sixteen of the twenty-nine Old Testament scenes use the omniscient narrator, while only six of the twenty-three New Testament episodes do, a statistic accounting for the former being the weaker section because it fails to provide what Lieberman (“Notes on James Dickey's Style” 1968) calls the feeling of “heightened reportage” (63). While exceptions to this in the Old Testament do exist, such as the account of Jacob's wrestling with an angel or of Joseph and the coat of many colors, these episodes for the most part fail to depict the fusion of inner and outer states. Each scene seems isolated and still, as if constrained within its own boundaries, an immobility that “negates the motion, the energy, that allows Dickey's best ideas to work” (149). Though the Old Testament section exhibits his main theme of transcendence, it remains “a gathering of fragmented thoughts” (149). The New Testament stories, however, allow Dickey more latitude to create the fusion of forces because Christ embodies the union of God and man. Additionally, Jesus is the speaker in five of the episodes and the subject of most others, which enables the reader to know him through experiences related by other voices. For example, Mary comments on her son's birth: “He is mine, or at least half of him is mine. … I cannot understand any of this, but I do know I hold in my lap a child who comes from me. … God needs a human mate to bring forth a human child.” Christ possesses a double vision, seeing both into the world and beyond it, allowing him a serenity derived from knowing what other men through God may become. This attitude of becoming is the foundation of Dickey's work. He alludes to this theme in the foreword when he notes “the fabulous world we all have fallen from, and toward which we are always falling, not backward in time, but forward toward that moment when each story, each image of God will be found, will happen again.”

In an interview in the spring 1976 issue of the Paris Review, Dickey refers to any effort other than poetry as a “spin-off” (Ashley 81), adding: “The main thing in poetry is the discovery of an idiom and the exploitation of it over an area of thought for a long period of time” (81-82). Bowers-Martin sees Dickey as successful here because the creative lie has remained the idiom through which he has successfully explored transcendence (150). However, in the interview Dickey also declares, “A poet's pages are filled up with what he's done, that he can live on and trade on; but he has got to find some way to love that white empty page, those words he hasn't yet said” (76). Here, God's Images fails because it does not fulfill Dickey's stated hopes as a poet. The scenes are merely “his old pages repackaged, and the process diminishes their quality” (151).

Dickey returns to the South in Wayfarer: A Voice from the Southern Mountains (1988), the subtitle indicating the continued use of his cultural and family heritage. The unnamed narrator greets a wayfarer he encounters at the book's opening. Superstitious and wise, he has lived his life in the Appalachians. When the traveler becomes sick, the narrator uses mountain medicines to restore his health, taking the wayfarer on a figurative journey as he talks about the food, geography, customs, handiwork, folklore, and music. He asserts, “We ain't got everything, but we got somethin'.” As with Jericho and God's Images, the book is a collaborative effort, with William Bake's photographs not so much adhering to the story as cohering. The 178 pictures, primarily from the Southern Appalachians and particularly that section of the range from North Carolina, also strangely includes photographs from Texas and Oklahoma.

Reviews are almost nonexistent and generally superficial. Adams (1989) briefly compliments Dickey's “charming text” and Bake's “fine photographs” (120) and observes that the setting is appropriately never identified. Starr (1988) also views the joint effort as beneficial, declaring that the pictures reveal “an explorer's sense and an artist's eye” (1F) and comparing Bake to Monet and Wyeth. The people he captures belong only to the mountains; they are “constant, sturdy, quietly dignified” (1F). The pictures, however, are rarely correlated to Dickey's prose passages, most being grouped at the book's conclusion where they serve as “a visual epiphany” (8F).

Van Ness's (1989) essay-review more substantially discusses the book's dramatic development, declaring that Wayfarer “is not, or at least not only or even principally” (31) a coffee-table book. Bake's photographs create “an emotional immediacy,” while Dickey's understated language presents truth as “an imaginative connection” (31), linking the reader to what the Appalachians are in and of themselves, “their spacial and metaphoric fullness” (31). To do so, Dickey guides the reader on an heroic journey to recover what modern man has lost. As the narrator declares in “Departure,” for example, speaking of mountain people, “They got ways of knowin'.”

Dickey has always celebrated the individual who either begins over or who returns to a source and who must therefore relate what he has learned. That voice often appears suddenly in the narrative as the poet follows his own personae. Chance occurrences begin a poetic search for the forces that govern life, a search revealing “man's awful responsibility to drive toward self-discovery and self-determination” (32). The encounter between the anonymous narrator and the wayfarer, therefore, presents a familiar Dickey concern—the confrontation between an individual and a force larger than himself. In Wayfarer that other is the Southern mountains. While Dickey has poetically treated aspects of this subject before (for example, foxhunting and quilting in “Listening to Foxhounds” and “Chenille,” respectively), the narrative framework of Wayfarer allows for greater breadth of treatment to depict what Van Ness calls “a larger natural inclusiveness in the world” (32). Consequently, when the speaker asserts, “It don't matter why it comes, but it does; it comes on through, and it's done been put into both of us, don't you see,” Dickey moves beyond a discussion of family blood lines into “the lines of connection that link all men to the land and the natural impulses, the human need, to create and re-create what one sees and hears in the world” (32).

While The Zodiac and Puella also concern the artistic impulse and depict an individual seeking an exchange, Wayfarer differs in several respects. Not only does it attempt to have the visual and the verbal mediums interrelate, but its speaker also acts as an intermediary or guardian spirit, a guide who imparts to the adventurer certain protective amulets, as when the narrator gives the wayfarer a fairy stone shaped “like a cross” and which brings “good luck.” As a result of his experiences, the traveler becomes “the new priest, a man who has been both outside and in” (32). His decision at the conclusion to speak for the first time, quoting Ransom's “Antique Harvesters,” shows that he has undergone mythic rites of passage. Having crossed a threshold and penetrated forgotten truths, he poetically offers up what he has learned as he now prepares to return.

Southern Light (1991), Dickey's latest collaborative effort, attempts to capture through a poetic prose and the color photographs of James Valentine the distinctive qualities held in and projected by light. Valentine's 188 pictures dominate the book, which sections a day into dawn, morning, noon, afternoon, and evening and examines the world as light defines it during those times. In the introduction Dickey urges the reader to undertake the imaginative connection himself, a similar surrender critics like Bowers-Martin fault in his other oversized books. “Enter light,” Dickey says,

as though you were part of it, as though you were pure spirit—or pure beholding human creature, which is the same thing—to become part of light in many places and intensities, to make it something like a dream of itself with you in it; that way you will be seeing by human light, as well as by the light shining since Genesis.

Unlike his previous mixed-media works, the prose text does not complement but anticipates Valentine's photographs. Their subtle textures and startling vibrancy demand confrontation, while Dickey's description establishes the uniqueness of the respective moments captured by the camera. When at dawn, for example, light causes the things of the world to come into themselves, Dickey invites participation by singling out what one might personally hold in perspective: “In all remoteness you have a hand, as everything sharpens, attunes: sharpens toward. If you want more leaves, beckon, and they come.” In evening, he asks how successful the encounters have been and reminds the reader of the special quality of what light makes possible: “Nothing like it ever given, except by means of Time. This time, this day.” The artistic intent seeks to allow a physical and emotional confrontation by having the words defer to the photographs and yet prepare one to experience them. Dickey establishes this collaborative dependency when, speaking of the creative impulse present throughout all human history, he states in the introduction: “The cave artist and the photographer, standing for all others, want to see not through but into: want you to stay with and in the work, and for it to stay with you, for it is in its very essence a form of ritual magic.” While Dickey guides the reader's journey through the twenty-four hours Southern Light captures in words and pictures, he paradoxically remains less tangible a presence than in Wayfarer, despite his use of the imperative and despite the latter's narrative, which often subsumes Dickey's voice. However, as in all his efforts, his principal concern is the sense of consequence derived from human communion with the world.