DICKEY
Or
even worth seeing at all
But the spirit of this place just the same,
Felt here as jO'j.
481
That metamorphosis has occurred in Dickey's latest book,
Buck–
dancer's Ch'oice,
which Wesleyan brought out in 1965, and occurred
with such a rush of impulse that the reader of the earlier collections,
having come to expect the somnambulist forms of Dickey's imagination
of recurrence, will be jarred by the immediacy, the brutality of disjunct
actions, performed once and, however celebrated, done away with. There
are, of course, reminders-"Fox Blood" and "War Wound" are two---<>f
the old incantatory pieties, the magical world where each Thing possesses
the properties of Another, a world of available correspondences:
Touched with the moon's red silver,
Back-hearing around
The stream of his body the tongue .of hounds
Feather him. In his own animal sun
Made 'Of human moonlight
He flies like a bolt running home.
...
But for the most part, Dickey's universe, and the measures which accom–
modate and express his phenomenology of exchange, has ceased to
be
one of eternal return, of enchantment. Instead, once out of eternity, the
poet confronts and laments (exults over) the outrage of individual death,
of a linear movement within time--each event and each moment being
unique, therefore lost.
If
the self can die, then others exist, survivors
of what Newman, in another connection, called an aboriginal catastro–
phe. Obsession, madness, excess: the burden of
Buckdancer's Choice
is
altogether new in this poet,and crowned, or ballasted, by a pervasive
terror of extinction. That is the penalty of the historical imagination;
its reward is the awareness of others, always incipient in this poet but
never before, by the very system of his discourse, explicit. In two of the
poems about graves in this book, it is notable that the poet speaks of
that terror, and of that awareness. In "The Escape," Dickey envisions
his own gravestone:
It is an open book
Of cardboard and paper, a simulated Bible,
All white, like a giant bride'S,
The only real pages the ones
The book opens to.
...
