DICKEY
483
larger efforts, are there the assent-inducing rhythms of spiraling chant,
the beautiful generalities of transfiguration. Here we get novelistic detail,
as in "The Fiend," a poem explicitly about a voyeur:
Her stressed nipples rising like things about to crawl off her
A hold on himself.
With that clasp she changes
senses
Some breath through the fmgile walls
some all-seeing eye
as he gets
something
or deliberately parted fragments, the natural rhythms sundered:
...
the tops of the sugar
Cane soaring
the sawgrass walking:
I come past
The stale pools left
Over from high tide
where the crab in the night sand
Is basting himself with his claws
moving ripples outward
Feasting O'n brightness
and above
A gull also crabs slowly,
Tacks, jibes
then turning the corner
Of wind, receives himself like a brother
As he glides upon his reflection.
...
Those last two lines remind us of the old incantations given over, and
suggest what we may gain by keeping awake: an ability to confront the
body's death as well as the spirit's life, without lulling the mind to sleep
by hypnotic rhythms, occult correspondences.
Certainly the most remarkable item
in
Dickey'S latest work is "The
Firebombing," a very long poem
in
which, as I read it, the same move–
ment outward upon a real world, magic discarded like Prospero's, books
drowned and the natural man acknowledged-dolefully, awkwardly, but
inevitably-is rehearsed in terms of the poet's own past and present
circumstances. (A new irony is afforded by the epigraph from Gunther
Eich: how perfect that it should be a contemporary German poet who
remarks that "after the Catastrophe, each man will claim
that
he was
innocent"!) At the same time that he, he the poet James Dickey, no
other man, in a waking dream carries out a napalm raid upon Japan,
"sitting in a glass treasure-hole of blue light," he reviews his own sub–
urban life twenty years later:
...
in thi. half-paid for pantry
Among the red lids that screw O'ff
With an easy half-twist
to
the left
And the long drawers crammed with dim spoons.
...
