[In the following essay, Laurence analyzes the volume Puella, emphasizing a movement toward the aesthetic “possession” of its female subject and a balancing stylistic quality of “lightness” in the poems.]

James Dickey's collection of poems, Puella, begins with the dedication, “To Deborah—her girlhood, male-imagined.” The nineteen difficult poems published in only one edition by Doubleday in 1982, and a small private printing by Pyracantha Press in 1985, limn a poet's changing imaginings of his young wife as a girl coming of age. The poems illumine Dickey's epigraph:

I lived in thee, and dreamed, and waked
Twice what I had been.

T. Sturge Moore

Coming to these poems from the masculine wilds of Dickey's novel, Deliverance, the work that looms largest in the American imagination, we veer in this collection into another kind of male voyage, this time into womanhood. Male imaginings of women have been under review since Virginia Woolf in her graceful polemic, A Room of One's Own, attempted to explain, in part, the imaginative necessity that women so often are to men. She describes “the looking glass vision,” how “women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size” (35). Dickey is no exception: he awakes from his imagined encounter with Deborah's girlhood at least “twice” what he had been.

Feminist critics continue in the spirit of Virginia Woolf to observe the male voicing of womanhood as they take new critical turns into the historical and social inscriptions of language that bind women to certain roles or images. Amidst this scholarly activity, however, women continue to wonder why women poets do not write collections of poems about the boyhood of their lovers or husbands, and why male poets and novelists are so intrigued by the idea of possessing with the pen, the girlhoods or womanhoods of the women with whom they are engaged. The obsession to recover her past, particularly her sexual relationships, and to know and record them jealously leads to a terrifying conclusion. What such works share with Dickey's more innocent Puella is the author's desire to possess his woman, “before she met him.”

Through the centuries, a reader might identify this impulse to “possess” as peculiarly male; women more often are “possessed” than “possessing.” As Emily Dickinson states:

I am afraid to own a Body
I am afraid to own a soul
Profound-precarious property
Possession.

Women are often afraid to own their own souls, bodies and voices, let alone anyone else's. And when they do seek to possess, as does the energetic Maud Bailey in A. S. Byatt's recent novel, Possession, it is, astonishingly, Victorian love letters. Since this critical consideration of Dickey takes place at a time when such social paradigms are being questioned—when women are less patient with male fictionalization of women's experience and are struggling to possess their own voices in literature—we pause. … Dickey has, after all, presented us, in his previous works, with a certain vision of the “masculine.”

Acknowledging then that “possession” is Dickey's drive in these poems, “lightness” is the quality that holds. “Puellae” in various kinds of personal and cultural flight are, somehow, levitated by the quality of Dickey's writing. He breathes what he has lived and dreamed of the sensuous life of his “puella”—in her Southern landscape—into her voice in these poems. We, in the meantime, rehearse in our heads the current declension of “correctness.” Puella: We must remain in our own skins. Puellae: We must remain in our own bodies. Puellae: We must remain in our own gender. Fixed identities. Dickey, despite his glorification of male initiations and macho stances—the hunter, the ex-combat pilot—resists such fixity of identity and admirably pits his imagination against social naming. As James Applewhite perceptively says of the poem, Dickey seeks “to feel through her senses, wake in her psyche” (150). I would broaden the field of “being” or “non-being” even further to suggest that he also attempts to awaken the consciousness of a doll, trees, rain, a whale, an environment or the sounds of crows. Dickey's Puella attempts what Gerard Genette ascribes to literature in general: “[I]t breathes new life into the world, freeing it from the pressure of social meaning, which is named meaning, and therefore dead meaning, maintaining as long as possible that opening, the uncertainty of signs which allows one to breathe” (41).

Acknowledging the “uncertainty of signs,” we make the critical turn from identity politics with its delineation of “identity” as fixed, toward a more complex view of the relation between gender, the imagination, and literature. Defend we must Dickey's exploration of the “I” and the “not I” as dimensions of being, and his imaginative rights to live in Deborah. He places a female speaker in a mythical and Southern landscape, breathing into her his voice: classical images of Athena springing from the head of Zeus come to mind. But note that he voices not only the dissolving line between male and female, but also girlhood and womanhood, past and present, the animate and inanimate, human and nature, and the actual and mythical. Deborah, somehow, always in motion, always “veering” into being something else, is a vector, Ungraspable. The challenge then of reading these subtle difficult poems is, “who is speaking?” And as Virginia Woolf further queries in one of her short stories, “when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking?” Is it Deborah? The male poet? Or is it an androgynous voice, both the “male” and “female” self of Dickey in dialogue? And what about the various animate and inanimate voicings that are also part of this speaker?

Different aspects of Deborah, ostensibly the changing, growing speaker, are presented in this collection. Each poem “veers” in another direction, some of them clustering about certain themes like magnetic filings. Dickey imagines Deborah in mythical and cultural relation to her body (menses, sex, death); to her family (mothers, grandmothers); to the house (civilization); to nature (Southern landscape, moon, rain, woods / flowers, animals); to sounds (the piano, crows); to the past (heraldry); and to fantasies. In “From Time,” Deborah imagines “for Years at the Piano”; in “The Lode,” we experience “Deborah's Rain Longing”; in “Tapestry and Sail,” “She Imagines Herself a Figure Upon Them”; in “The Surround,” “Imagining Herself as the Environment, She Speaks to James Wright at Sundown.”

The formalist Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin warns that, resist as we might, social namings are in us, and inscribed in our experience and language. We find in the opaque language of these poems a male presence or sensibility, at times, making it difficult to assess whose “experience” is being represented. In the first poem in the collection, “Deborah Burning a Doll Made of House-Wood,” Deborah burns her childhood self symbolized by a doll. She begins,

                                        I set you level,
Your eyes like the twin beasts of a wall.
                    As a child I believed I had grown you,
                    And I hummed as I mixed the blind nails
          Of this house with the light wood of Heaven—
                    The rootless trees there—falling in love
With carpenters—their painted, pure clothes, their flawless
          Baggies, their God-balanced bubbles, their levels.

Through Deborah's voice, we encounter metaphors of carpentry. The tools of Deborah's perception that take the measure of the “doll,” also her childhood self, are the “level” with its “God-balanced bubble,” “the blind nails,” “the light wood of Heaven,” and “the squared mess of an indoor wood-yard.” The poet has breathed language that is gender-marked into Deborah's voice as she watches the dust of her doll, indeed her childhood, bodying “into smoke.” This leaves us with a sense that both the male speaker and Deborah intertwine in perception, language and voice. Deborah continues, and we visually observe a balance in the spacing of the first line below to match Deborah's perception—“levelling” throughout the poem—and then in the fifth line, we observe the step-like lines of the “rungs,” the “climbing,” and the “domestic ascent” of the doll-child:

                    I am leaving:                    I have freed the shelves
                              So that you may burn cleanly, in sheer degrees
                                                  of domestic ascent, unfolding
                                        Boards one after the other, like a fireman
His rungs out of Hell
                                                                                or some holocaust
                                                                                                                                  whelmed and climbing:

Both the spaces and the words speak and mean in a Dickey poem. Deborah, after this ascent, this levitation of the doll-self, has “the power to see / Pure,” and moves on to another aspect of the self in “Deborah, Moon, Mirror, Right Hand Rising.” In this poem she observes in a mirror “the moon coming up in my face,” and she experiences,

                    New Being angled with thresholds.
                                                  Woman of the child
                    I was, I am shone through now
In circles, as though the moon in my hand were falling
                                                  Concentrically, on the spirit of a tree …

Here Deborah is absorbed into both a natural and mythical world through her mirror; comically, “All pores cold with cream.” She is moon; she is human, she is tree, even dryad; she is stone. Transparent,

A woman's live playing of the universe
                    As inner light, stands clear,
                    And is, where I last was.

All kinds of identities are mystically traversed in her “new being.” The poet imagines Deborah in “a body out-believing existence, … set going by imaginative laws, emblem eyes, degenerate with symbols” (“The Lyric Beasts”). The landscape of dream and myth, juxtaposed with Dickey's familiar terrain of woods and animals and the physical pleasure of being, leads us to appreciate the deeply felt connection between the man and the changing woman in these poems.

Again, the quality of the writing and perception that one experiences in these poems is “lightness,” the feeling that one falls through them sensuously, somehow balanced in flight: and, at times, levitating, rather than just reading them. Italo Calvino in Six Essays for the Next Millennium, discusses the virtue that the quality of “lightness” that removes “weight from the structure of stories and from language” (3) will have, as he projects this quality into the future of literature. He predicts that “The lightness is also something arising from the writing itself, from the poet's own linguistic power, quite independent of whatever philosophic doctrine the poet claims to be following” (10). In choosing an image for the new millennium, he selects one that might well apply to some of Dickey's poetry: “The sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness” (12).

This lightness is present in even the darkest of Dickey's poems. In one of the most intriguing poems of the collection, “Veer Voices: Two Sisters Under Crows,” Dickey's voice splinters into the voice of Deborah, her sister as well as the screeches of the crows—somehow to be heard all through this poem, with “their spirit-shifting splits / Of tongue.” Again, we observe the poet traversing different dimensions of “being,” not localized in the human, but located mid-way between nature and the human in sound and image. The screech of crows “veer-crying and straining like wire” shadows this poem, the sisters psychically placed under the screeching of the “night-mass of families”:

                    Sometimes are living those who have been seen
                              Together                    those farthest leaning
                              With some dark birds and fielded
Below them          counter crying and hawing in savage openness
          For every reason. Such are as we, to come out
                                                  And under and balance-cruise,

The spaces of varying length and the placement of words in this description of the dark birds, sisters, together, create a visual veering or change of direction to match the veer-voices of the sisters:

                                                  A crossroads and passing out
                    One kind of voice in skinned speeches
                    All over the place          leaning and flying
                                        Passing into
                                                                                                                        flying in and out
Of each other
                                                                                          with nothing to tell of
          But the angles of light-sensitive dust
                    Between fences leaded with dew,
                              You might say back,
                                                                                          Come with me
                    Into the high-tension carry

We both see and hear the voices of the sisters and the crows “flying” in and out, identities blurring in the tense visual field of words and spaces on the page. It is almost as if the “countercrying” crows who “surround” the sisters in nature teach a voice or a knowledge of no human tone, “unfathomable” to human ears. Again Dickey explores the “I” and the “not I”: sisters in relation to one another, a man in relation to women, humans in relation to birds and their sounds in nature. Dickey bids the sisters to listen and move into the “high-tension carry” of this other world. Despite the Poe-like ominousness of the invitation, this poem, nevertheless, has a quality of lightness.

“Turning” not only his poetic lines but the dark parable of the two sisters into “lightness,” Dickey again reminds us of the paradoxical “lightness” to be found in “gravity.” This “lightness” arising from the gravity of the dark intuitions about Deborah's relations, about the relation between the human and natural worlds, then becomes a principle for reading Puella. Dickey, the poet, navigating the space of the page as Dickey, the air force pilot, navigated the space of sky in World War II and the Korean War.

In the poem, “Deborah in Ancient Lingerie, in Thin Oak Over Creek,” Deborah asserts all that she can “do” but again the stances and the language somehow suggest a male mirroring. The poet captures the “lightness” of the erotic acrobatics of a man and a woman with the imagery of the aerial beam and heron-veins in a landscape of mythic and actual outdoors. The poem and the reader levitate:

I can do
                                                  gently, just over you:
                                                                                          balance-beam disdain
                                        Like heron-veins over the forest
                              When my spirit is branching, when I
                                        Catch it and don't spend it, I can do:
                                                            All kinds of caused shade
I can do, and unparalleled being
                                                                                          I can do, snake-screaming
                                        Withering, foster-parenting for animals
I can do
                                                                                very gently from just about
                    Right over you, I can do
                                                            at no great height I can do
                                                                                          and bear
And counter-balance and do
                                                            and half-sway and do
                                                                                          and sway
                                                                                          and outsway and
                                                                                          do.

We catch the sensuous rhythm of the erotic from the visual patterning of word and space, as well as the wildness of the sound of “snake screaming.” And in the macho tones of words and movements, the repetition of “do” and “gently … over you” and “balance-beam disdain” and “catch” and not “spend” and repeated swayings, we sense this is a man—not Deborah—complicating again our notion of the experience and the speaker represented in these poems. Nevertheless, in the “move” and “do” and “bear” and “sway” and “half-sway” and “outsway,” we, as readers, move across the visual space of the page in a choreography of eye and sense, creating a special relationship between the poet and the reader. The spaces of varying length to mark pauses and even a full black page in an earlier poem, “Apollo,” for the first manned moon orbit, suggest conceptual, visual, and auditory play in Dickey's poetry. The spaces and blackness are a place, just as Laurence Sterne offered in Tristam Shandy, for the participation of the reader.

The “female” companion piece to “Deborah in Ancient Lingerie, in Thin Oak Over Creek” may be the glorious poem, “RayFlowers.” Though it feels like a violation to quote only part of this poem or any of the other poems in this collection because of the importance of Dickey's choreography of space, a part of it will supply the feeling of lightness, and falling, and “consent”:

                                        As when we all fell all day
                                                                                Consenting
          Sight-softening                    space-massing
Time-thickening                                        time-floating more
                                                                                Light

The repetition of words such as “consenting” (somehow echoing Molly Bloom's “yes, she said yes …”), “sown,” “fall” and lines such as:

                                                                                          Come:
Muffle          splinter          increase          fill

suggest something, I think, closer to female sensibility. But then we might ask why Deborah says later,

                                                                      Super-nerved with weightlessness:
                              All girls of cloud and ego in your time,
                                        Smoked-out millennial air-space
                                                  Empowered with blurr, lie down
With bindweed force                    with angelic clutter and stillness
                                        As I hold out and for you unfold
                                        This feather-frond of a bird …

Though straining for Deborah's own sexual dawning in this poem, it is, nevertheless, intertwined with the male speaker's prowess, unfolding his “feather-frond of a bird.” We shift in different lines to different aspects of sexual experience.

One poem where Dickey crosses over more successfully into female and animal experience and voice is “Deborah as Scion.” Deborah at the family cemetery connects with her mothers and grandmothers, traversing the line between the past and the present. In this passage, which is beautiful in its movement and too long to quote, Deborah moves “back, from mother to mother” and is “totally them in the / Breasts, breath and butt.” But she is also curiously alive and in touch with whales whose bones have served for the corsets of confinement for them and Deborah:

                                                                      I stand now in your closed bones,
Sucked-in, in your magic tackle, taking whatever,
                              From the stark freedom under the land,
From under the sea, from the bones of the deepest beast,
                    Shaped now entirely by me, by whatever
                                        Breath I draw.

Identifying with the whales, crossing over from the human to the animal, Deborah and the whales are “paired bones of the deep” joined by the confinement and violation of their bodies. Whatever her own bodily confinements, her being grows as she identifies with and feels the ripping-up and boiling down of the whale “for animal oil.” She hears “the weird mammalian bleating of bled creatures” and thinks,

                                                                                          This animal
                              This animal                    I stand and think
Its feed                    its feel          its whole lifetime on one air:
                                        In lightning-strikes I watch it leap …

Anyone who has ever watched a “volcanic” whale leaping in the deep knows Deborah's visceral sense of the primeval, and of the mythic proportions of these creatures. Perhaps the “volcanic,” unconscious structuring of a girl's sexuality into the poem reminds us of Deborah's moving out from cultural restriction into her own experience of sexuality as a woman. “Out-believing” her existence as a woman, entering into the experience of a whale, we again move into a “deepening sense of being” that Laurence Lieberman writes of in a Dickey poem. And we hear, hear, the “weird mammalian bleating of bled creatures” just as we heard the “snake screaming” and the screeching of the crows in earlier poems. And in the penultimate poem, “The Surround,” where Deborah imagines herself as the environment speaking to James Wright at Sundown, she is no longer even human but mythically dissolved as a presence in the environment—spiritually sprinkled in nature—to surround and protect the male poet, James Wright, as a beneficent spirit:

                                                                                          Stay with me
                                                                      And without me, hearing
Your hearing come back in a circle. After midnight no ax
                                                                      Shall be harmful to your wholeness,
No blood-loss give life. You are in your rings, and growing
                                                            In darkness. I quell and thicken
                                                                                          Away. I am

The surround, and you are your own.

In this collection then, Dickey, the male poet, blurs easy distinctions between male and female, man and woman and nature, the animate and the inanimate, the human and the animal, the past and the present, the actual and the mythic, and the landscape of mind and place and page. What is most important is that Dickey attempts (with mixed results) to present a girl-woman, not solely in relationship to other people, but in relation with her girlhood, womanhood, body, life, death, and nature. She does not exist in traditional relation to man, though she is “themed” to meet the male poet. We find her, imperfectly mixed in voice with male sensibility, in relation to the universe. Entering into many dimensions of being and non-being, not just the Puella of the title, Dickey attempts to breathe new and strange life into poetry. He invites the reader into the generous space and dance of words on the page—his puella, somehow, in flight.

Works Cited

Applewhite, James. “Reflections on Puella.” Southern Review 21, (January 1985): 214-19.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

Calvino, Italo. Six Essays for the Next Millennium. Trans. Patrick Creagh. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1988.

Dickey, James. Deliverance. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970.

———The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1970.

———Poems, 1957-67. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UP, 1967.

Genette, Gerard. Figures of Literary Discourse. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

Lieberman, Laurence. The Achievement of James Dickey. Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1968.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929.