[In the following review of Dickey's Poems: 1957-1967, originally published in 1967, Lieberman remarks on Dickey's poetic vision and its mixture of the comic and the serious.]

The persona in James Dickey's new poems, those that appear in the final section, “Falling,” of his book Poems: 1957-1967, is a unique human personality. He is a worldly mystic. On the one hand, a joyous, expansive personality—all candor, laughter, and charm—in love with his fully conscious gestures, the grace and surety of moves of his body. An outgoing man. An extrovert. On the other hand, a chosen man. A man who has been picked by some mysterious, intelligent agent in the universe to act out a secret destiny:

                              … something was given a life-
mission to say to me hungrily over
And over and over your moves are exactly right
For a few things in this world: we know you
When you come, Green Eyes, Green Eyes.

from “Encounter in the Cage Country”

How does a man reconnect with common, unchosen humanity when he has just returned from the abyss of nonhuman, chosen otherness? That is the chief problem to which the final volume addresses itself. How to be a man who feels perfectly at home, and at his ease, in both worlds—inner and outer. A man who can make of himself and his art a medium, a perfect conductor, through which the opposed worlds—both charged with intensity—can meet and connect, flow into each other. The worldly mystic. It is the vision of a man who for years has been just as committed to developing his potential for creative existence as for creative art. All discoveries and earnings, spiritual or worldly, must carry over from one universe to the other.

In the best poems of the previous volume, Buckdancer's Choice, the self is frustrated, paralyzed, helplessly unable to establish liberating connections with the world. The chief obstacle to self-liberation is a sense of moral guilt. In “The Firebombing,” “The Fiend,” and “Slave Quarters,” the self is pitilessly subjected to encounters with life that induce feelings of criminality. Clearly, the writer has deliberately trapped the persona in predicaments of contemporary American life that automatically create an aura of grave moral jeopardy. In all three poems, the conflict between the worldly-mindedness of modern life and the inner life of the spirit is dramatized. Materialism of a kind that blocks the persona in its struggle to connect with the world is embodied in the indulgences of suburban middle-class home life of “The Firebombing”; in the businesslike exterior of “The Fiend,” his guise of normalcy and ordinariness; and in the catalog of inferior occupational stereotypes, earmarked for African Americans by our society, in “Slave Quarters.”

Wherever being is trapped in oneself or in others, the existential self must work, either through art or directly in life, to make lifesaving connections—all those connections that create the free interchange of spirit between being and being. The word connect is the central one in Dickey's new poetry. His spirit must connect with the world, with “all worlds the growing encounters.” In the best poems, all the connections are good. “I am a man who turns on,” and when he turns on, all worlds he connects with turn on, since wherever he connects, he creates personal intimacy, injects intensity: “People are calling each other weeping with a hundred thousand / Volts.”

The one poem that perfectly reconciles the contradictions between worldliness and the inner life of the spirit is “Power and Light.” The happiness of power and light heals all broken connections, “even the one / With my wife.” For the artist, the hardest connections to “turn good” may be the home connections, the ones thorny with daily ritual and sameness: “Thorns! Thorns! I am bursting / Into the kitchen, into the sad way station / Of my home. …” But if the connections are good, all worlds flow into each other, the good healing, cleansing the bad. There is woe in the worldly side of marriage, but it is good in its spiritual and sexual dimensions, in the “deep sway of underground.”

“Power and Light” dramatizes the secret life of a pole climber, a technician who works for the power company. Through the disguise of the persona, Dickey explores symbolically the ideal relationship between the artist and his audience, the poet and his readers:

                                                            … I feel the wires running
Like the life-force along the limed rafters          and all connections
With poles          with the tarred naked belly-buckled black
Trees I hook to my heels          with the shrill phone calls leaping
Long distance          long distances through my hands          all connections
Even the one
With my wife, turn good … Never think I don't know my profession
Will lift me: why, all over hell the lights burn in your eyes,
People are calling each other          weeping with a hundred thousand
Volts          making deals          pleading          laughing like fate,
Far off, invulnerable          or with the right word pierced
To the heart
By wires I held, shooting off their ghosty mouths,
In my gloves.

The pole climber's spirit raises the spirits of the dead and damned from Hell—marriage, too, being a kind of hell. The “ghostly mouths” of the spirits can all reconnect through the power lines—lines of the poem—and save themselves. The poet is blessed with such an access, a surplus, of lifesaving joy, that he can afford to let it—the flood of power and light—overflow into the grave, into Hell. He doesn't so much give life to the damned as open them up to hidden resources of life, newly accessible in themselves, by making connections. “Long distance,” an eerie experience to begin with, becomes more haunting still when Dickey extends it to include connections between living and dead spirits.

Dickey proceeds in his vision to a point “far under the grass of my grave.” No matter how deep he travels, even to Hell, in the fuller mastery of his art he is confident that “my profession / Will lift me,” and in lifting him, it will lift thousands of others from Hell, his readers all over the world, symbolically making long-distance phone calls all night, connecting, all the connections good. He feels the same power, whether in the basement of his home, “or flung up on towers walking / Over mountains my charged hair standing on end.” The spirit that pervades and dominates this poem, finally, can be identified as the spirit of laughter, a laughter closely akin to that of Malachi the stilt jack in Yeats's “High Talk,” or the mad dancer of “A Drunken Man's Praise of Sobriety.” Like these poems, “Power and Light” verges on self-parody in its hyperbolic imagery and rhetoric: “And I laugh / Like my own fate watching over me night and day.”

The comic spirit of “Power and Light” recovers the ground lost by the tragic spirit in the moral dilemmas of “The Firebombing” and “Slave Quarters.” If modern man feels helpless before the massive political nightmare of his time, he finds he can retreat into “pure fires of the Self” for spiritual sustenance. This is the artist's escape and salvation. If he can't connect with the tragic people of this world's hell in daylight, by direct political action, he must reach them in “the dark, / deep sway of underground.” The artist's night is the “night before Resurrection Day.” He will resurrect the imagination, the spiritual life, of his age. He performs these wonders, ironically, drunk in his suburban basement. A general in disguise. An unacknowledged legislator of the world. Regrettably, the philosophy if I turn on everyone turns on with me may offer small comfort in the political world.

If the worldly mystic spends a good portion of his day-to-day existence reconnecting with the world, at other times we find him searching for the pure moment in solitude, waiting to receive messages from the unseen beyond and to answer the call. If he is receptive enough, he may pick up clues to learning his being from a wide range of sources: a rattlesnake, a blind old woman, a caged leopard. In all such poems Dickey himself would seem to be the protagonist, the poem being a kind of reportage of an event from the author's life, in contrast with poems such as “Power and Light” and “Falling,” in which the persona and the author are completely separate, on the surface level.

“The Flash” is a weak poem, hardly more than a fragment of verse, but it gives the key to understanding the revelatory moments in the other poems in the group:

Something far off          buried deep and free
In the country          can always strike you dead
Center of the brain. There is never anything
It could be          but you go dazzled …

You can't explain the flash logically, or fasten hold of it with your senses, but what is felt when “you go dazzled” is instantly recognizable, and can be distinguished, unerringly, from other events of the spirit. The flash is a spiritual fact that registers in the poet's intelligence with the same cold, tough certainty as a snakebite. It is a guarantee of the inner life, but also insists on the inner life of the Other, of others “far off buried deep and free.”

In “Snakebite,” the encounter with the Other seems fated. “The one chosen” finds “there is no way not / To be me.” There is no way out, or through the experience, except saving oneself:

                                        … It is the role
I have been cast in;
                    It calls for blood.
Act it out before the wind
Blows: unspilt blood
Will kill you. Open
The new-footed tingling. Cut.
Cut deep, as a brother would.
Cut to save it. Me.

One must act out the roles that are thrust upon one by the Other, inescapably, as by the rattlesnake's poison. Art must invade those moments in life when failure to perform the correct self-saving gesture is to die. Art is a strange kind of intimacy, a blood brotherhood, between the artist and himself. The poem must be an act of bloodletting. In saving the poem, as in saving one's life from snakebite, a man must be his own brother. No one else can help.

Midway through the action, the speaker shifts from the mortal necessity of lancing the wound to a moment of comic staging. At this point in Dickey's art, it seems appropriate and convincing for the comic spirit to interrupt the most serious human act of self-preservation. The laughter of self-dramatization parallels similar moments in “Encounter in the Cage Country,” in which comic relief enhances the seriousness of the exchange between man and leopard:

                              … at one brilliant move
I made as though drawing a gun from my hip-
bone, the bite-sized children broke
Up          changing their concept of laughter,
But none of this changed his eyes, or changed
My green glasses. Alert, attentive,
He waited for what I could give him;
My moves          my throat my wildest love,
The eyes behind my eyes.

In “False Youth II,” the blind grandmother's message, like the word of an oracle, is delivered with absolute certitude: “You must laugh a lot / Or be in the sun.” Her advice strikes a reader as being a deeply personal and literal truth in the author's life at the time he wrote the poem, and this hunch is borne out by the relevance her words have to many of the best poems of the new volume. A comic spirit pervades poems such as “Power and Light,” “Encounter in the Cage Country,” and “Sun” that one had not met or foreseen in Dickey's earlier work.

Dickey presents an experience from life in “False Youth II” that taught him to see deeply into the shifting sands of his own personality as he slid, imperceptibly, from youth into middle age. Youth is a “lifetime search” for the human role, or roles, that, when acted out, will serve as a spiritual passport of entry into middle age. The necessary role may take the form of a physical gesture that perfectly corresponds to deep moves of the spirit: “My face froze … in a smile / That has never left me since my thirty-eighth year.”

The old blind woman unknowingly assumes the role of a fortuneteller. She has developed a superhumanly receptive sense of touch. Her life is contracted intensely into her hands, her fingertips having grown fantastically sensitive and alive. As she runs her fingers over his eyes and forehead, the poetic images envision a scientific and quasi-scientific composite of data linking electromagnetism, finger painting, astronomy, genetics, and fortune-telling:

… I closed my eyes as she put her fingertips lightly
On them          and saw, behind sight          something in me          fire
Swirl in a great shape like a fingerprint          like none other
In the history of the earth          looping          holding its wild lines
Of human force. Her forefinger          then her keen nail
Went all the way along the deep middle line of my brow
Not guessing but knowing          quivering          deepening
Whatever I showed by it.

The wisdom of the old woman has a primeval quality about it. Her acutely sharpened instincts and sense of touch precede the scientific age and surpass recorded modern science in a revelation of human personality that draws on the learning of many sciences, but goes beyond each in its ability to connect them all, which is not to say this literally happens in life. It happens, rather, in the images of the poem's vision.

She leads him to discover that he has come to a crossroads in his life and art. He must learn his life, as his art, and each stage of existence—in both worlds—concludes with a search for the blueprint to the next stage. The blueprint cannot simply be willed into existence. It is contained as a deeply true, hidden map of possibility within his developing self. If there are alternative paths latent and waiting to be journeyed in the self at any particular spiritual crossroads (as in Frost's poem “The Road Not Taken”), there is one best route available at each crucial juncture. It is discoverable, and, once discovered, it has an unmistakable ring of truth: “Not guessing but knowing quivering deepening.” Although the answer waits inside him to be released, he cannot find his way to it by himself. He arrives in himself through a deep conjunction with another being, in faith, “some kind of song may have passed / Between our closed mouths as I headed into the ice.” There must be communion with the Other. Connection.

If one of the major new themes in Dickey's fifth volume is comic dramatization of his own personality, another is sexual realism. In both, he parallels the later Yeats. If we compare the vision in “The Fiend” with that in “Falling” and “The Sheep Child,” we can get an idea of how far Dickey's art has traveled between the first major poem dealing with the theme of sexual realism and the last. In “The Fiend,” the free-flowing form and the split line are fully exploited. This technique is well suited to sustained psychological realism. Also, the fiend is a thoroughly convincing persona. The encounter between him and life experience, though voyeuristic and “abnormal,” is presented as final, incisive, fulfilling.

But somehow, the center of the poem's vision is too far from tragedy and believable danger: the poem lacks risk, the emotional pitch of a cosmos of love/beauty stretching to contain and transform a brutal agony of being. The sexual transcendence the persona unknowingly achieves is almost too evident, preordained. Equipoise is not felt to be the outcome of a fierce yoking together of oppositely charged beings, as in the act of coitus between the farm boy and the mother ewe of “The Sheep Child”:

                              … It was something like love
From another world that seized her
From behind, and she gave, not lifting her head
Out of dew, without ever looking, her best
Self to that great need. …

The stench of evil in “The Fiend” is smothered under the catalogs of domestic inanities. There is no trace of the searing terror of “The Sheep Child,” the terror of our settled scheme of things being ripped apart. It is too easy to dismiss the fiend as a genial saint—spiritually, if not bodily, harmless. “The Sheep Child” and “Falling” threaten us with glimpses into a world of becoming that is grimly near to us, a mere hand's reach away from those extensions of being into the beyond that we all easily attain in moments of emotional intensity. And yet, that farther reach somehow eludes us, staying just out of our ken. The secret of uncompromised being is just a spiritual stone's throw away, but we are cut off. These poems soar into that further beyond with a sense of effortlessness and inevitability.

“The Fiend” was a breakthrough into the hinterland of sexual transcendence, but what begins as a reader's sympathetic identification ends as a comfortably removed appreciation of the poem's novelities. “The Sheep Child” and “Falling” trap the reader in a haunting, if inexpressible, certainty that a much larger, grander, demonic world—compounded of Heaven and Hell—lies just the other side of the limits of his known, calculable existence. And it waits, like the dead, for him to step inside:

                    I woke, dying,
In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes
Far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment
The great grassy world from both sides,
Man and beast in the round of their need,
And the hill wind stirred in my wool,
My hoof and my hand clasped each other,
I ate my one meal
Of milk, and died
Staring …

The reader must be willing to drown, fly, burn with a flame that sets all dreams on fire, and be the fire.

From “The Fiend” to “Falling,” Dickey has been trying to find a medium that would enable him to use the maximum of his creative intelligence in poetry. To this end, he has chosen in “Falling” exactly the right subject and form. Both are moving toward a rhythm of experience that can sweep away all obstacles to realizing the fullest human potential:

“One cannot just fall          just tumble screaming all that time          one must use / It.”

When a woman's life space has suddenly contracted into a few seconds, the necessity to conquer mental waste, to salvage every hidden but discoverable shred of mental possibility, becomes absolute.

The opening sections of the poem stress the extent to which the girl's will, intention, participates in her experience. Her body and mind are both forced initially into reactions of powerful self-protective resistance, a mere reflex response to shock. But her will and creative imagination take on a larger and larger quotient of control. The female style of control is mixed with passivity, but the dynamic passivity of girding the body, sensually, as she “waits for something great to take / Control of her.” The beauty of healthy, fulfilled physical life is Dickey's momentary stay against the chaos of the poem's life-crushing void. Within a moment of perfectly fulfilled physical being, her spirit lives an eternity.

The girl is strangely mated to air. The first half of her long, erotic air embrace is a turning inward. She is learning how to be, to be “in her / Self.” She masters “one after another of all the positions for love / Making,” and each position corresponds to a new tone or motion of being. The second half of her adventure is a going outward. She is no longer waiting to be taken hold of, but now she is the aggressor, who “must take up her body / And fly.” The shifts in her body cycle—falling, floating, flying, falling—stand for consecutive stages in a being cycle, rising, as she falls to her death, to a pinnacle of total self-realization. It is a movement from extreme self-love to extreme beyond-self love, a movement from being to becoming, from becoming to going beyond. Although her fall concludes with an autoerotic orgasm, she connects, at the moment of climax, with the spirits of farm boys and girls below; there is a profound flow of being between them. This unobstructable river of feeling between the self and the world is the life process to which Dickey ascribes ultimacy in his vision.

If ideas of rebirth and reincarnation are among the most compelling and pervasive in Dickey's art, the idea of resurrection by air—not water, earth, or fire—is the one that rises, finally, into apocalypse. A cursory glance at Dickey's biography might well support my hypothesis that, since the gravest spiritual losses to his manhood were incurred in air—via the incineration of women and children in the napalm bombing of Japan—he could be expected to seek compensatory gains to redeem himself, paradoxically, through that medium. In fact, he does achieve his most sustaining spiritual and poetic gains through the vision of air genesis. It is my hope that in the years to come Dickey will return to the perplexing questions of war and race dealt with in “The Firebombing” and “Slave Quarters,” and bring to his renewed treatment of those themes—surely the most troubling specters of our day—the larger generosity of spirit we find in the vision of “Falling” and “Power and Light.” If there is a passion today that can counterbalance all the hell in us, it is the ardor that fills these poems.