[In the following excerpted review of Dickey's The Selected Poems, Gwynn acknowledges the energy of the poet's early verse, unfortunately underrepresented in this collection.]

If James Dickey, whose selected poems¹ have recently appeared, is to have any lasting legacy, it strikes me that it will lie in the way he was able to infuse our suburban humdrum with an energy that is well nigh sacramental. Rereading early poems like “Sleeping Out on Easter,” “The Vegetable King” or “The Mountain Tent,” I know that this is just Everyguy camping out in a state park on the fringes of urban Atlanta, but a palpable shiver still comes with lines like:

I am hearing the shape of the rain
Take the shape of the tent and believe it,
Laying down all around where I lie
A profound, unspeakable law.

Those incantatory trimeters contribute to the effect, true, but I can never hear them without feeling a little smaller and weaker, without wishing my inadequate sleeping bag could hide me completely. As stagey and predictable as many of Dickey's performances seem when we revisit them, they were, and are, capable of generating an awe that none of his contemporaries ever quite managed. If I am not quite struck with it on reading “Falling” for the umpteenth time, I can at least honestly recall that I was the first five or six.

Rupert Brooke's reputation has declined mightily, but that falling off seems less precipitous than the collapse of Dickey's, the fault less of the poems that made his name than of the noisy celebrity and weak books of his last two decades. His work has all but disappeared from the anthologies of American literature, and even in Norton's recent The Literature of the American South he is allotted only the same number of pages as nikki giovanni! His son's widely read memōir and the inevitable biographies will doubtless spur reassessments; thus, it is good to have Robert Kirschten's portable volume at hand. That said, I can't help but have several regrets about the editor's initial assumptions and the choices that result. In an attempt to define Dickey's best qualities, Kirschten outlines Dickey's “four major poetic modes”: his natural mysticism, his Pythagorean reverence for music, his romanticism, and his primitivism. These are valid enough, perhaps, but they ignore the solid grounding in his generation's realities that gave Dickey's early work such resonance. First, there are the war poems. Kirschten includes “The Performance,” with its curious syntax brilliantly mimicking the unsteady acrobatics of its doomed protagonist, but he excludes “Between Two Prisoners,” in which two captured Americans await execution in an island schoolroom, and the spooky “The Driver,” where Dickey (as always, a problematical assumption) dives into a Pacific lagoon and sits in the driver's seat of a sunken half-track.

Further, I miss many of Dickey's best poems of postwar civilized discontent: “The Leap,” a narrative about the suicide of a woman remembered from childhood; “On the Coosawattee,” which contains the probable (and certainly less melodramatic) genesis of Deliverance; “Power and Light,” a brutal blue-collar dramatic monologue; and “Adultery,” which is bracketed by the best opening and closing lines of any Dickey poem: “We have all been in rooms / We cannot die in, and they are odd places, and sad” and

We have done it again                    we are
Still living. Sit up and smile,
God bless you. Guilt is magical.

I would have preferred more guilty magic like this (and where is the marvelous “Kudzu”?) to reprinting the ten-page “Reincarnation (II)” or more than the briefest sample from Dickey's last book, the inscrutable The Eagle's Mile.

Kirschten states that his aim is “to gather and showcase [Dickey's] very best material” and in doing so has to admit that Dickey's collected poems, The Whole Motion, is a bit too whole for most tastes (even Dickey excluded portions of the slack Puella). Kirschten does get a fair portion of the best ones in his limited space (the book is over a hundred pages shorter than Poems 1957-1967), but it is probably a sign of the times that in introducing Dickey's four “politically controversial” poems—“Slave Quarters,” “The Fiend,” “The Sheep Child,” and “The Firebombing”—he feels it necessary to attach a disclaimer (his italics): “Further, representation is not recommendation.” Now we can all sleep better. One wonders how this editor would preface a selection from the works of Robert Browning.

Note

1. The Selected Poems, by James Dickey. Ed. by Robert Kirschten. Wesleyan University Press.