The Whole Motion: Collected Poems, 1945-1992 / Edition 1

by James Dickey

Overview

For over three decades, James Dickey has been one of the nation’s most important poets and a prominent man of letters. The Whole Motion collects his poetic oeuvre into a single volume: 235 poems from his first book, Into the Stone (1960), to The Eagle’s Mile (1990), along with previously uncollected poems and unpublished “apprentice” works.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819512185
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	03/01/1994
Series:	Wesleyan Poetry Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	494
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.09(d)

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 Médicis for his novel Deliverance (1970). His most recent book is a novel, To the White Sea (1993).

What People are Saying About This

John Updike

“A career-spanning collection by National Book Award winner James Dickey, ‘the high flier of American poets.’”

Wallace Stegner

“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”

Editorial Reviews

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

Library Journal

There is a physicality and a willfulness, a biblical sweep and grandness to Dickey’s poetry whether he’s writing about dust or combat, trees or animals, love or seasons . . . A definitive retrospective.”—Booklist

“One of the things we should mean when we call a poet ‘good’ is that his work returns us to the world and not merely to the poet. We do not assimilate good poetry; we become included in its imagination. James Dickey is a good poet, very good.”—Michael Goldman, The Nation

From the Publisher