[In the following unfavorable review, Plumly asserts that The Zodiac is “overwhelmed by its own ambition.”]

James Dickey ends his twelve-part, twelve-tiered poem of The Zodiac with a kind of nautical prayer.

                              Oh my own soul, put me in a solar boat.
                              Come into one of these hands
                              Bringing quietness and the rare belief
                    That I can steer this strange craft to the morning
Land that sleeps in the universe on all horizons
                              And give this home-come man who listens in his room
                              To the rush and flare of his father
                    Drawn at the speed of light to Heaven
Through the wrong end of his telescope, expanding the universe …

This moment, almost an interlude in spite of its conclusive position, suggests not only a rest from the labors of a long journey but an arrival at a place of reconciliation. This, for the poet and his poem, is the Land of Nod, the still-point in his ever-turning world. It is also the most believable writing in a book overwhelmed by its own ambition. Dickey has been among our most distinguished poets, unique, really, in terms of the energy, the emotional pile-drive of his work. Poems 1957-1967 represents one of the best ten years out of any contemporary American writer's career. The Zodiac is his first volume of poetry since the success of Deliverance. The bitch-goddess cliche may be too handy, especially as the collection of poems immediately preceding the novel (The Eye-Beaters, etc.) was decidedly uneven. But the new book, star-glazed and star-crossed, is a mistake in conception and execution. First of all, the book's, the poem's origins are borrowed. As Dickey explains it: “This poem is based on another of the same title. It was written by Hendrik Marsman, who was killed by a torpedo in the North Atlantic in 1940. It is in no sense a translation, for the liberties I have taken with Marsman's original poem are such that the poem I publish here, with the exception of a few lines, is completely my own. Its twelve sections are the story of a drunken and perhaps dying Dutch poet who returns to his home in Amsterdam after years of travel and tries desperately to relate himself, by means of stars, to the universe.” Except for a few lines. No doubt the writing is all Dickey's. Yet why confuse the substance with the suggestion? Why be so literal-minded about the sources: by setting the poem in Amsterdam, by appropriating a Dutch sailor-poet? If the poem, “with the exception of a few lines,” is completely Dickey's, why not complete the exchange—why not steal whole-heartedly and write directly out of the facts of one's own life, drunken and/or dying, instead of effecting an elliptical and artificial mode? The result of the borrowing is that Dickey is forced to create a character, to narrate a protagonist into the material, to speak of and through a third person that the poet, at critical junctures, absorbs into his own large voice. The Zodiac reads like a failed fiction, because it does not ring true. There are more than liberties at stake here; oddly enough, Dickey's poem has the feel of being made from whole cloth. As for the making of the poem, its imagination, its language, Dickey reaches beyond hyperbole to what, for want of a word, we must call superbole. For example:

                                        When the tide turns
He turns left          his eyes back-swivel into his head
                    In hangover-pain like the flu          the flu
          Dizzy with tree tops
                                        all dead, but eye going
Barely getting          but getting you're damned right but still
                    Getting them.
                                        Trees, all right. No leaves. All right,
Trees, stand
                    and deliver.          They stand and deliver
Not much …
                              You son of a bitch, you! Don't try to get away
                                                  from yourself!
I won't have it! You know God-damned well I mean you! And you too,
                    Pythagoras! Put down that guitar, lyre, whatever it is!
You've driven me nuts enough with your music of the spheres!
                    But I'll bet you know what to know:
                    Where God once stood in the stadium
Of European history, and battled mankind in the blue air
                    Of manmade curses, under the exploding flags
Of dawn …

If it sounds like bombast it must be bombast. Dickey's rationalization for the compounding, ever-expanding rhetoric is to pass it off as the hallucinosis of a drunk—“Christ, would you tell me why my head / Keeps thinking up these nit-witted, useless images? // Whiskey helps.” One of his chief means for illustrating that rhetoric is the famous Dickey-shift—that variable pause or parting in or around a line in which the white space and silence inveigh against the speech. The consequence is melodrama, as throughout the poem—the words spreading like star-charts across the page—the speaker indulges the imitative fallacy of being drunk, hung over. The art of the thing and the sobriety of the artist himself are continually called into question. Our ears almost numb, our eyes half-opened, the language demands, page after page, that we pay attention. All of the above aside, The Zodiac could have at least been a good story, but it has no plot, no vital cause-and-effect forward and inevitable motion to its “action.” Except for being inside a drunk Dutch poet's hangover, inside the self-exile of his Amsterdam room, “over the broker's peaceful / Open-bay office at the corner of two canals,” except for his short season in hell, we have too little to deal with—except Dickey's cosmic vision. And vision, of course, is what the zodiac is all about. A vision of destiny as well as design, a vision of omnipotence (“Religion, Europe, death, and the stars: / I'm holding them all in my balls, right now.”) as well as impotence (“I've traveled and screwed too much.”). A vision of the macro world in the mind of one man. Like a lot of beautiful ideas, without the complication of a story this vision rests in stasis: and without its working-out and working-through, it seems a gratuity. Ironically, for all his “polar-bearing” through his poem, there is not enough of Dickey in it—none of the particulars, none of the local terrors that might convince us that a poet of his stature stands behind it. These sixty-two pages were to be an ontological journey, and struggle, from a place of disaffection to a place of affection, out to the stars, out to those shapes that only seem to make sense, and back again, back home. The Zodiac suggests a man in real trouble, dumb drunk to the bone, shouting the walls down, writing it down.