POEMS, 1957-1967

James Dickey, fresh from winning a National Book Award and an appointment as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, has also recently been enshrined in one of Life magazine's pictorial essays where the Dow Jones rating was a smashing "presently the hottest of emerging U.S. poets." Is Dickey being groomed as the All-American successor to Robert Frost? The collection here contains Dickey's three previous volumes and a sampling of later work, including "Falling," his most adventurous experiment in the "open" structure since "The Firebombing" of two years ago. While Dickey's themes remain fairly constant—fugitive intermingling with nature, family, childhood, the wartime experience—he has been steadily, if subtly, breaking off from his early well-constructed mode and reaching out towards the rawer, shapeless "conclusionless poem" with the line-breaks, shots of rapid quasi-cinematic images, and a dramatic action which is both of the everyday and a kind of mystic discovery of, or rebirth into, the phenomenal world. Masculine, compassionate, essentially conservative, Dickey's poems are incarnations of remembered joy and pain, a quietly intense celebration of the senses, an acceptance of the inherently tragic yet wonder-awakening landscape of man—the qualities, in short, of a good national poet circa the sixties.