The Virginia Quarterly Review
The love poems [in William Dickey's The Rainbow Grocery] are excellent—spontaneous, gentle, the mellow bittersweet tone reminiscent of Auden. Whimsical, colloquial, urbane, Dickey's voice is adaptable to many subjects and moods: myth, lyric, dramatic monologue, parody. Flat observations alternate with deft, sinister lines, identifying the ordinary with the grotesque. The poems sometimes strain to be offhanded and fanciful, detailing the confusion of his own life—but his genial posturing is still lovable.
A review of "The Rainbow Grocery," in The Virginia Quarterly Review (copyright, 1979, by The Virginia Quarterly Review, The University of Virginia), Vol. 55, No. 2 (Spring, 1979), p. 66.
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