[In the following review, Pratt discusses the language in The Eagle's Mile.]

Having long ago charted his place as a leading American poet of flight, James Dickey makes flight the central theme of his latest collection of poems. He borrows his title from a line of William Blake, "The Emmet's Inch & Eagle's Mile," and like Blake he mixes the visionary with the actual, sometimes mounting on the powerful wings of eagles, sometimes on the delicate wings of butterflies, letting his imagination soar into space or, at other times, calling back images of aerial gunnery in the Pacific, from his service as a night-fighter pilot in World War II and the Korean War. There is no poem in The Eagle's Mile as sensational as his earlier famous "Falling," which combines the exhilaration of flying, the erotic motions of a woman's body in space, and the inevitability of dying, but the brilliant colors of "To the Butterflies" offer a visual and descriptive feast to be enjoyed along with its imaginary flight.

Dickey has always been an experimentalist with form, never settling for casual or conversational free verse, but shaping his words in strongly patterned cadences, with frequent spaced pauses and marked accents in the manner of [Gerard Manley] Hopkins (suggesting that "The Windhover" is one of his models of poetic flight), producing staccato and crescendo effects that bear some resemblance to the vibrating movement of engines in human flight. Dickey has a fondness for the incantatory power of words which links him with [Edgar Allan] Poe, and as in Poe, the sounds of his words sometimes seem to take on more significance than their meanings, creating what Poe would have called an emotional "effect" more important than any meaning.

The title poem shows all the strengths, and the weaknesses, of Dickey's poetry: "The Eagle's Mile" is dedicated to the late Justice William Douglas of the U.S. Supreme Court, who was an outdoorsman like Dickey and loved the Appalachian Trail that ran "from Springer Mountain [in Georgia] to Maine," as the poem remembers, describing hiking journeys along the trial and also envisioning flight above it, where you "like Adam find yourself splintering out / Somewhere on the eagle's mile." In a trick of ventriloquy, however, the poem addresses Douglas directly as if he were still alive, making it the sort of public performance which Dickey more and more favors (he was the Poet Laureate of Jimmy Carter's presidency, and in the new collection there is a poem for "a South Carolina inauguration of Richard Riley as governor"), and at times he strains for words like the hurdler he once was—"Douglas, power-hang in it all now, for all / The whole thing is worth"—so forcing his reader into collaboration with him in what seems a rhetorical act of celebration as much as a poem.

Dickey's poetry is a mixture of the visionary with the actual that sometimes soars and sometimes runs aground, splitting consciousness as he likes to split his lines, thus deliberately keeping any single poem from becoming a unified and harmonious whole, despite its often singing and moving uses of language.