I discovered the poetry of James Dickey some forty years ago when his long poem, “Falling,” was first published in the New Yorker. Immediately I recognized a new voice and a new vision in contemporary American poetry. The rhythms and diction of its long run-on lines, barely punctuated but with caesuras marked with spaces in the lines, demanded an intensity in reading.

The poem, almost an incantation, was based on a news item from the New York Times, which told of an airline attendant who fell to her death when an emergency door blew open somewhere over Kansas. Audaciously, Dickey presumes to enter the consciousness of the woman falling, in the middle of the continent, in the middle of the night, her uniform being stripped from her. It is almost as if she were a sylph-like spirit freeing herself, assuming mythic dimensions in her own mind and in the dreams of men of the Midwest who survive her:

. . . while farmers sleepwalk without
Their women from their houses a walk like falling toward the far waters
Of life in moonlight toward the dreamed eternal meaning of their farms.

Though the form of “Falling” is unlike that of earlier poems in this collection, Poems 1957-1967 (Collier papeback, 1968), the “dreamed eternal meaning” is the motif that recurs throughout the book. Dickey’s imagery is earthy: land and water, animal consciousness, his own experience as a fighter pilot in World War II, the primitive depths of human perception, birth and death, angina and adultery. But out of this earthiness arise moments of unearthly insight, epiphanies beyond reason. Such poems are likely to begin with the common, the everyday, the ordinary — everyday images and rhythms and syntax. Take for example, “The Heaven of Animals”:

Here they are. The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.

But there will be a gradual, or sudden, heightening: “the landscape flowers, / Outdoing, desperately / Outdoing what is required”; and ultimately the creatures walk “in full knowledge / Of what is in glory above them.” The very title, “The Heaven of Animals” implies such an approach to ethereal heights from low, earthy levels.

Just to list a few of his titles will suggest both the earthiness of his imagery and the suprarational insight he invites: “The Vegetable King,” “Walking on Water,” “Listening to Foxhounds,” “Drowning with Others,” “The Dusk of Horses,” “Kudzu,” “Sled Burial, Dream Ceremony,” “The Sheep Child,” “Deer Among Cattle,” “The Leap,” and the like.

The sheep child, for instance, is an imagined museum exhibit in Atlanta, the offspring of “farm boys wild to couple / With anything.” From earthy to the unearthly: “I woke, dying, / . . . . / I saw for a blazing moment / The great grassy world from both sides, / Man and beast . . . .”

Even that insidious vegetative alien, kudzu, in the dark of night invades “your closed / leafy windows and almighty sleep.”

“Approaching Prayer” is perhaps the most overt statement of this recurring theme. Wandering around in his late father’s house, attempting prayer, he dons his father’s scratchy, gray sweater; his gamecock spurs; and the head of a boar the poet had once killed with two arrows. He imagines the consciousness of the dying boar, and his own experience intensifies.

Something goes through me
Like an accident, a negligent glance,
Like the explosion of a star
Six billion light years off
Whose light gives out

Just as it goes straight through me.

Like angels speaking to desert fathers, the son (the poet) has spoken “in Heaven’s tongue, / Using images of earth / Almightily.”

When I put together the anthology of my life — those poems that have spoken from the depths of a poet’s experience to the depths of my own — I certainly will include “The Hospital Window.” It begins, and ends, with the same simple line: “I have just come down from my father.” Leaving the hospital, I had just come down from where my father, too, lay “in the shape of his death still living.” Looking up at his window, oblivious, as the poet had been, to the traffic around me, I recited his poem to myself: “That the dying may float without fear / In the bold blue gaze of my father.” ( )

Wildly varying talent. ( )