456
WILLIAM
MEREDITH
JAMES DICKEY'S POEMS
HELMETS. By James Dickey. Wesleyan University Press. $1.85.
James Dickey's
Helmets
is set apart from the run of every·
day competent verse by its content: the poems arise from experience
that requires poetry to comprehend it. The absence of this sort of ex·
perience is what makes so much otherwise unexceptionable modem
poetry dull-the poets seem to have gone out of their way, conscienti·
ously, to make poems out of their own fine sensibilities. With Dickey,
the facts of his poems, or the best ones, demand a poem, and even
if these facts, this experience, is sometimes taken by inept strategy,
the results are nevertheless real poems and the experience comes on
unarguable and true.
Dickey sees things his own way, almost wilfully, and his strategy
is to bear down until the reader receives the....same intensity of vision.
J
t is unusual for a poet to hold so pigheadedly to a solipsistic insight
without becoming private or perverse. The method is best seen in four
or five magnificent poems in this book that are too long to quote:
"Cherrylog Road," about an adolescent love affair conducted in the
violent ruin of an automobil e graveyard, "A Folk Singer of the Thirties,"
which catches a character and an era in a vast, fierce metaphor, and
the first and last poems in the book, among them. But it can be seen
in small in the opening lines of "The Ice Skin":
All things that go deep enough
Into rain and cold
Take on, before they br.eak down)
A shining
in
every part.
The necks of slender trees
R eel under it) too much crowned)
Like princes dressing as kings)
And the redwoods let sink their branches
L ike arms that try to hold buckets
Filling slowly with diamonds
Until a cannon goes off
Somewhere inside the still trunk
And a limb breaks) just before midnight)
Plunging houses into the darkness
And hands into cupboards) all seeking
Candles) and finding each other.
