The Whole Motion: Collected Poems, 1945–1992 (Wesleyan Poetry Series) - Hardcover

Dickey, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0819522023 ISBN 13: 9780819522023

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 1992

Synopsis

Features more than two hundred poems, including previously unpublished works, documenting the development of a major literary figure who has greatly influenced a younger generation of poets

About this title

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
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0819522023
• ISBN 13: 9780819522023
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 494