✍ Scribed by Dickey, James
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
This is the definitive James Dickey collection. Wallace Stegner wrote that Dickey's poems leave the reader with "an awed sense of the pure power of these words." Better known as the novelist who wrote Deliverance, Dickey was one of the most important poets of the century. "The Lifeguard" is one of his best poems and is typical of his writing in its blending of the physical and spiritual worlds, in its memorable images, and in its marriage of sound to sense. This is one to read again and again, to be newly astonished.
This weighty volume offers an impressive testimonial to one of our most complex and prolific poets. Where others condense, Dickey enlarges. His long, limber stanzas have a rhetorical eloquence that seems characteristically Southern, and his sensibility reflects the influence of a rural culture whose relationship to nature is unsentimental and immediate. Some of the most haunting poems discuss flying and falling, as in the verse describing a stewardess swept through the emergency door of an airplane. Dickey subordinates the horror of the incident to a transcendent detachment as the flight attendant's clothes "come down all over Kansas into bushes on the dewy sixth green/ of a golf course one shoe her girdle coming down fantastically/ on a clothesline, where it belongs her blouse on a lightning rod." The publisher could have aided the reader by providing original publication dates as well as a title index, but this is a major collection by an important, prize-winning author. Strongly recommended for all collections.
*- Christine Stenstrom, Shea & Gould Law Lib. , New York*
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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