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.

From Library Journal
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 YorkCopyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Book Description
Documentation of the development of a major literary figure.

From the Publisher
6 x 9 trim. LC 91-50811

About the Author
JAMES DICKEY is Carolina Professor and Poet-in-Residence at University of South Carolina. His many honors include a Guggenheim, a National Book Award and a Melville Cane Award for Buckdancer's Choice (1965), and the French Prix Medicis for his novel Deliverance (1970). His most recent book is a novel, To the White Sea (1993).

FROM THE PUBLISHER

For over three decades, James Dickey has been one of the nation's most important poets and a prominent man of letters. The Eagle's Mile, his most recent volume, was a triumphant success, a bold and innovative departure from his traditional verse. The New York Times declared, "Dickey continues to extend his vision as a major American poet," while Fred Chappell, himself a Bollingen Prize winner, wrote, "If there were a literary prize for Poetry That Has Shown Real Moxie, it ought to go to The Eagle's Mile." Now, The Whole Motion collects Dickey's oeuvre into a single volume: 235 poems, ranging from his first book, Into the Stone, through the prize-winning Buckdancer's Choice, to The Eagle's Mile, as well as a selection of previously uncollected and unpublished "apprentice" works gathered under the title "Summons." The Whole Motion documents the development of a major literary figure, one who has greatly influenced a younger generation of poets; it illuminates the evolution of one of the finest poetic sensibilities of our times.

FROM THE CRITICS

"Dickey is no ruminator or meditator. Perception with him is not a static matter. It is characteristically, whatever his subject, a clash, a confrontation, something that might happen in a cyclotron; and the particles that are struck off are new and packed with primal energy, particles of order destroyed during the act of creation . . . What I am left with is an awed sense of the pure power of these words"

Library Journal