472
PARTISAN REVIEW
The obsessions are cooled, and the head that produces such obsessions
is seen by Dickey as an object of interest, of poetry, in its own right.
You and the paper should have known it, you and the ink: you write
Everybody writes
With blackness. Night. Why has it taken you all this time?
All this travel, all those lives
You've fucked up? All those books read
Not deep enough? It's staring you right in the face. The
secret–
Is whiteness. You can do
anything
with that. But no–
The secret is that on whiteness you can release
The blackness,
The night sky. Whiteness is death is
dying
For human words to raise it from purity from the grave
Of too much light.
At last the visions in Dickey's poetry are getting a home, a source:
someone is inventing them, someone with a consciousness not identi–
cal
to
the images it concocts.
But the attempt, it seems
to
me, is not successful. Much of the
reflective casualness is strained and feeble. The poet emerges as a
speaker in various voices that are all fundamentally impersonal. His
past, what he cannot any longer be, ought to be imagined much more
fully if it is brought up at all, in order for us to marvel at what he is
now. And the attempts to link his dying with the destruction of Europe
in the war only draw attention to the essential weightlessness in the
poem of the man and his predicament. A created consciousness is
trying to find a place in Dickey's created world, but it is as yet a
shadow, unable to inform the work, unable
to
engage us.
It is no surprise then that the poem's bravado is more successful
than its despair, or, perhaps more accurately, than its attempt to evoke
a power of desperation which is too vital a quality
to
become actual
despair. The bravado is easier to manage, and it produces better poetry.
The lines that invent a new constellation are wonderful:
My head is smashed with
aquavit,
And I've got a damn good Lobster in it for for
The Zodiac.
I'll
send it right up.
And lislen now
I want
big
stars: some red some while some blue-white dwarves-
