[The] protagonist of Dickey's [The Zodiac], a Dutch poet who uses the expression "Old Buddy," is a drunk. One would have hoped that the romantic image of the whiskey-poet had been finally smashed by Berryman's suicide. Not so. Alcohol and creativity go hand in hand for this poet….

More of a tour de force than the mesmerizing "Falling" or the brilliantly Gothic "May Day Sermon," The Zodiac marks a new departure for Dickey in that it is derivative…. (p. 96)

Dickey has divided his poem into twelve parts (related only numerically to the signs of the zodiac), each of which focuses upon a particular episode in the life of a man who after many years of travel has returned to his home town (Amsterdam), where he tries to order his life…. (pp. 96-7)

Specifically Dickey's is the drunkenness of the protagonist, as well as an appropriate openness of style (marked by an infusion of the colloquial) and form (the words sprawl drunkenly across these pages which [have been] widened for Dickey's purposes), which was anticipated by his previous book, The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy. At its worst, the openness leads to something like this:

                      Son of a bitch.
            His life is shot my life is shot.
 It's also shit. He knows it. Where's it all gone off to?
 The gods are in pieces
                      All over Europe.
                                  But, by God, not God—

Dickey's main contribution to The Zodiac is his development of the protagonist's interest in the stars, which Marsman (wisely, I think) only touched upon. This, indeed, is the focus of the later poem, which is about a man who (as Dickey puts it) "tries desperately to relate himself, by means of the stars, to the universe." (p. 97)

The fiction here is similar to that of the deeply stirring "Eye-Beaters," where desperate, blind, orphaned children beat their eyes to create sparks—a kind of internal zodiac. Here the poet, rather than turning inward for consolation, to tribal memories, the caveman artist drawing the life-giving animal ("the deer, still wet with creation"), turns outward to the macrocosm, the star-beasts of the zodiac—projecting in each case an imaginative pattern on space. The fiction is an intriguing one. But the whiskey-poet, who expresses a great deal of familiarity for his fellow-artist God ("Listen you universal son-of-a-bitch, / You're talking to a poet now, so don't give me a lot of shit"), attempts to link his drunkenness and creativity by taking on the role of God's bartender—"What'll it be?" goes the refrain. And in this role, he can try to serve up something life-giving to take the crab Cancer's place in the zodiac—a "healing lobster."

The Zodiac does manage to transcend the banal and ludicrous, especially in the last section…. The poet's concluding prayer begins:

  But now, now
          Oh God you rocky landscape give me, Give
  Me drop by drop
            desert water at least.
          I want to write about deserts
 
          And in the dark the sand begins to cry
          For living water that not a sun or star
  Can kill, and for the splay camel-prints that bring men,
    And the ocean with its enormous crooning, begs
 
        For haunted sailors for refugees putting back
          Flesh on their ever-tumbling bones
            To man that fleet, for in its ships
                Only, the sea becomes the sea.

In such a way does Dickey resolve the antinomies—art/often following [his predecessor] Marsman quite closely. Here is the Dutch poet's (or his translator A. J. Barnouw's) version of the passage just quoted:

        And in the dark the desert made its plaint
        For living water that no heat will dry,
        And for the footprints of a caravan.
        And the ocean's siren song begged for a crew
        To man its waves with a high-riding fleet,
        For without ships the sea is not a sea.

Although Dickey insists in his preface that the poem is "in no sense a translation," close correspondences such as this seriously limit its originality. We are left, indeed, with not much more than the boozy ranting and ludicrous fiction of the poet bartending for God. (pp. 97-8)