[In the following review, Berry describes some of the poems in Helmets as clumsy and mechanical.]

Going into this book [Helmets] is like going into an experience in your own life that you know will change your mind. You either go in willing to let it happen, or you stay out. There are a lot of good poems here. “The Dusk of Horses,” “Fence Wire,” “Cherrylog Road,” “The Scarred Girl,” “The Ice Skin, Drinking from a Helmet,” and “Bums, on Waking” aren't the only poems I thought moving and good, but they are the ones I keep the firmest, clearest memory of.

Thinking just of the poems I've named, I realize to what an extent sympathy is the burden of this book, how much there is of seeing into the life of beings other than the poet. The reader is moved imaginatively and sympathetically into the minds of horses at nightfall, of farmer and animals divided and held together by fences, of a young girl scarred in a wreck, of bums waking up in places they never intended to come to.

“Drinking from a Helmet” represents not the fact of sympathy, but the making of it. The poet moves from his own isolated experience of war into an almost mystical realization (and assumption) of the life of the dead soldier from whose helmet he drinks. A tense balance is held between the felt bigness of the war and the experience of the one young man.

“Cherrylog Road” is a funny, poignant, garrulous poem about making love in a junk yard. It surely owes a great deal to the country art of storytelling. It's a poem you want to read out loud to somebody else, and it's best and most enjoyable when you do.

But I think that Mr. Dickey is also capable of much less than his best. There are poems that seem to have been produced by the over-straining of method, ground out in accordance with what the poet has come to expect he'll do in a given situation. “Springer Mountain” will illustrate what I mean. The poem tells about a hunter who, on impulse, pulls off his clothes and starts running after a deer. I can't help believing that the power of insight and feeling that is the being of a poem like “The Dusk of Horses” becomes equipment in “Springer Mountain.” The poet seems to be using capabilities developed elsewhere, and to be using them deliberately and mechanically. The hunter's gesture, or transport or whatever it is, seems to have been made to happen, and isn't seen with enough humor to mitigate its inherent silliness and clumsiness. After a good many readings I don't yet feel I know how it is meant or what it means. And more than that, I have no faith in it, no belief that anybody ever did any such thing. It's like watching a magician's act that, in spite of a certain brilliance, remains flatly incredible.

Usually involved in the weakness of the weaker poems is a dependence on a galloping monotonous line-rhythm (nine syllables, three or four stressed, five or six unstressed, the last unstressed) that can be both dulling and aggravating. The point isn't that this happens, but that it happens often. And when it happens it acts as a kind of fence, on the opposite sides of which the poem and the reader either give each other up or, worse, go on out of duty.

But I want to end by turning back to the goodness of the book. There are poems here of such life that you don't believe they're possible until you read them the second time, and I've got no bone to pick with them.