Excerpts
from the full-length essay in The Times Literary Supplement:
Am
I still drunk?
By
JULES SMITH, 25 October 2013
The
Times Literary Supplement
James
Dickey, THE COMPLETE POEMS, Edited by Ward Briggs 960pp. University of South
Carolina Press. $85.
In
the concluding scenes of John Boorman's film Deliverance (1972),
James
Dickey (who wrote the screenplay and the novel it is based on) appears as the
local sheriff, telling the north Georgia river's surviving canoeists
"Never come back up here.” Dickey's poems share certain qualities of that
character: a folksy, expansive machismo, capable of humour yet having an
undercurrent of menace. The violent ecofable of Deliverance - suburban man
confronted by savage nature - was also emblematic of Dickey's poetry, animated
by visceral sensory experience, filled with scenes of hunting, fishing, war,
sports and sexual obsession. A bizarre and poignant 1966 poem "For the
Last Wolverine,” for example, invokes "the wildness of poetry,”
urging the extinction-threatened wolverine and eagle to "mate / To the
death in the rotten branches.” …
What
this weighty Complete Poems convincingly shows is that Dickey's writing
was always as much fictional as confessional, making emotive impact by
rhetorical means, like the advertising copywriter he also was. Dickey once
remarked that the poet "is not trying to tell the truth. He's trying to
make it.” His favoured form was therefore the dramatic monologue, in which the
poem "is both an exploration and an invention of identity.”
Consider
the editor Ward Briggs's statement that Dickey was "transformed into a
poet by World War II". The war provided a rich subject, certainly, yet
many details in the works it inspired are invented, notably the beheading of an
American airman by the Japanese in "The Performance" (1959). One of
Dickey's most bitterly controversial poems, "The Firebombing" (1964),
questions "aesthetic evil" in the thoughts of a pilot dropping napalm
on civilians "In bed, or late in the public baths" when "One is
cool and enthralled in the cockpit, / Turned blue by the power of beauty.”
The
culpability of flawed characters runs through Dickey's writing, sometimes
uncomfortably close to home, as with the lengthy, lurid flagellation scenes of
"May Day Sermon" (1967) to the women of Gilmer County, Georgia, by a
Baptist preacher exhorting punishment for sexual sins. … Dickey's descriptive
powers are peculiarly distinctive when moving through landscape or suggesting a
hunter's mystic sense of communion with his target, "like a beast loving /
With the whole god bone of his horns: / The green of excess is upon me"
("Springer Mountain"). …
Ward
Briggs's edition contains all 331 poems, in chronological order of publication,
a structure that shows how he developed from clumsy early rhyming towards free
verse dramas via continual experiments with poetic forms. Briggs meticulously
lists publication data and textual variants and gives explanatory notes,
incorporating Dickey's statements though also correcting them.
In
later years, Dickey's tone became mournful. He reacted to the death of his
first wife Maxine with poems about visiting her grave to seek forgiveness, and
he lingered over his brother Tom's deathbed in "Last Hours" (1994).
In a beautiful elegy to mark F. Scott Fitzgerald's centenary, "Entering
Scott's Night,” he modestly places himself
among
guests at one of Gatsby's parties, "A dark-glowing field of folk, the
dead, the celebrants.” James Dickey claimed: "What I want to do most as a
poet is to charge the world with vitality.” Despite what Richard Howard has
called his "conflicted spirit,” and self-mythologizing - or because of it
- this definitive edition proves that he succeeded.”
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