[The poems in The Strength of Fields] float down overwide pages, contract to a single word or expand across the page, lapse into italics, skip over blank intervals. They are like richly modulated hollers; a sort of rough, American-style bel canto advertising its freedom from the constraints of ordinary language. Dickey's style is so personal, his rhythms so willfully eccentric, that the poems seem to swell up and overflow like that oldest of American art forms, the boast….

"The Strength of Fields" [bristles] … with the muscular, excessive imagery that is Dickey's signature….

One recognizes Dickey's familiar themes: the obligatory World War II poems; the fighter-plane poems; the tonguein-cheek redneck poems; above all, a set piece Dickey does better than anyone else: the dream of grandiose escape….

Dickey is one of few American writers—Norman Mailer is another—whose imagination rides the edge of violence. He is brilliant describing the lurching descent of a fighter plane onto a makeshift airfield, in "Two Poems of Flight-Sleep." In "For the Death of Vince Lombardi," he avoids the sweaty male bathos of most sports poems by evoking the "epic tools" of football with such boyish wholeheartedness that football, with its "aggression meanness deception delight in giving pain to others," comes to stand for the onslaught of life itself….

Yet the best poems in the book—"The Rain Guitar," "The Strength of Fields," "Exchanges"—speak in a reflective, meditative tone that is, finally, more convincing than Dickey's redneck male voice. (p. 6)

The most ambitious poem in the book is "Exchanges," a free-wheeling meditation on love, industrial pollution and the moon, that "small true world of death."… Dickey calls the poem "a living-dead dialogue" with a turn-of-the-century poet named Joseph Trumbull Stickney. As Stickney's haunting lines interweave with Dickey's, they form a sort of duet, accompanied by the poet's "wild guitar" played "in the great low-crying key of A…."

The poem brings to bear all the sprawl and outrageousness of Dickey's style. Yet there is a plaintive undertone, muted, almost melodramatic, as if the poem were also a ballad….

It is a stunning performance. Indeed, the whole book is something of a performance, symbolized by the poet's guitar, which reappears in a number of poems, striking off improvisations. At their worst, the poems are swamped in language; at their best, a moving simplicity organizes Dickey's virtuoso leaps into a large human utterance.

The book concludes with a section entitled, somewhat coyly, "Head-Deep in Strange Sounds: Free-Flight Improvisations From the Unenglish." These are not quite original poems and not quite translations either; more like variations on a theme by Russian, European, Chinese and Latin American poets. Dickey is not one to be bound by constraints. His variations tend to be so loose and eccentric they make Robert Lowell's "Imitations" sound timidly faithful. Despite some successes, this section of the book is disappointing. (p. 17)