Best Selling Books by James Dickey

"In The One Voice of James Dickey, Gordon Van Ness skillfully documents James Dickey''s growth from a callow teen interested primarily in sports to a mature poet who possessed literary genius and who deliberately advanced himself and his career. The letters from 1942 through 1969 depict Dickey gradually establishing a self-identity, deciding to write, struggling to determine a subject matter and style, working determinedly to gain initial recognition, and eventually seeking out the literary establishment to promote himself and his views on poetry. The letters also portray a complex personality with broad interests, acute intelligence, and heightened imagination as well as a deep need to re-create his past and assume various roles in the present." "From Dickey''s extensive correspondence, Van Ness has selected not only those letters that best reveal the chronological development of Dickey''s career and his conscious efforts to chart its course, but also those that portray his other interests and depict the various features of his personality. The letters are grouped by decade, with each period placed in perspective by a critical introduction. The introductory sections offer a psychological understanding of Dickey''s personality by identifying the needs and fears that affected his actions. They also explain the American literary and cultural scene that Dickey confronted as he matured. Together, the letters and commentary yield a sense of Dickey''s complex personality - both the man as a writer and the writer as a man - while arguing that he remained "one voice."" "Because how a writer writes - the appearance of a writer''s words on a page - makes a statement, the letters are reproduced here without alterations. There are no silent deletions or revisions; the original spelling and punctuation have been preserved. Dickey''s letters gathered in The One Voice of James Dickey portray a poet''s consciousness, chronicling its growth and revealing its breadth. They do not contain the whole truth, but they are what we have."--Jacket.

Although the notebooks identify the influence of writers such as George Barker, Hart Crane, and Dylan Thomas, they primarily present a man endeavoring to chart his own artistic course or destination.

Direct and dramatic poems point out the contrasts and agonied of this amoral age.

Poems that marked a new direction for a master poet

The canoe trip from hell. Classic take of four men caught in a primitive and violent test of manhood. Their adventure turns into a struggle for survival.

Classic poems from a famous American poet This volume represents, under one cover, the major work of the man whom critics and readers have designated the authentic poet of his American generation. For this collection, James Dickey has selected from his four published books all those poems that reflect his truest interests and his growth as an artist. He has added more than a score of new poems—in effect, a new book in themselves—that have not previously been published in volume form. Specifically, Poems 1957-1967 contains 15 of the 24 poems that were included in his first book, Into the Stone (1960); 25 of the 36 that made up Drowning With Others (1962); 22 of the 24 in Helmets (1964); the entire 22 in the National Book Award winner Buckdancer''s Choice (1965); and, under the titles Sermon and Falling, the exciting new poems mentioned above. Seldom can the word "great" be used of the work of a contemporary in any art. But surely it applies to the poems of James Dickey.

Published to coincide with his son Christopher Dickey''s memoir, "Summer of Deliverance, " this collection of poems and prose distill''s James Dickey''s tremendous talent and influence, and sheds light on his remarkable career.

For over three decades, James Dickey has been one of the nation''s most important poets and a prominent man of letters. The Whole Motion collects his poetic oeuvre into a single volume: 235 poems from his first book, Into the Stone (1960), to The Eagle''s Mile (1990), along with previously uncollected poems and unpublished "apprentice" works.

In this gripping first-person narrative, the bestselling author of Deliverance tells about an American gunner''s efforts to stay alive in Tokyo during the last months of WWII. As he treks north, his journey becomes more than an escape--it escalates into a violent odyssey of self-discovery and an exploration of the primal nature of war and man.

Over 400 letters that are as entertaining as they are erudite, revealing the fierce and complicated intellect of one of the most popular American poets and novelists of the 20th century. Written between 1943 and Dickey''s death in 1997, most of them deal with literature, particularly poetry; the recipients include Robert Penn Warren, Ezra Pound, William Styron, Richard Wilbur, Stanley Burnshaw, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, John Berryman, Andrew Lytle, Denise Levertov, Peter Viereck, Philip Booth, Anne Sexton. Of particular interest are the apprenticeship letters in which the young poet develops contacts and shapes a career; and the late period in which the ailing man of letters confronts his guilt and debilitation as well as various family tragedies.

This collection includes a foreword by poet Richard Howard, president of the PEN American Center and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his 1969 collection, Untitled Subjects.

The world of James Dickey is founded in great and basic realities - the human ties of family and history, the world of nonhuman nature, the inhuman world of war. He sees these things, on their surfaces, as all men see them. But to that general view he adds the special quality of dream, of a constant play back and forth between what is easily evident and the half-glimpsed revelation that lies masked beneath it. Whether it is a hound running foxes at night, or the harlots of Pompeii fixed in crude paint on the walls of their chambers, or the memory of dead kings brooding over the cliffs of Dover, all that he senses is given a fresh interpretation and a special meaning that are at once deeply private and broadly universal. To read Mr. Dickey''s poems is a rewarding experience indeed. --Wesleyan University Press.

Housman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare, and Robert Bridges.

In Self-Interviews, James Dickey speaks thoughtfully and with candor of his life as a poet. He recalls how poetry came to be his career, tracing its growing importance in his life from his youth in Georgia through his years overseas with the Air Force, as a student at Vanderbilt, as a teacher, and as a successful advertising executive. He also tells of how he reworked the life around him into poetry, of the fleeting impressions and lingering thoughts that were the seeds of some of his finest poems, including “Cherrylog Road,” “The Lifeguard,” “The Fiend,” and “Falling.” Following only a rough outline, Dickey recorded these spontaneous monologues in June, 1968, not long after the publication of his Poems, 1957–1967, which collected the work from his first five books. These musings, then, date from what was in many ways a natural vantage point on his artistic development, a moment ripe for recollection and analysis. Dickey uses the occasion not only to look back on his career but also to consider his preferences and goals as a poet. “I would like to be able to write a poetry,” he reveals, “that would have something for every level of mind, something that would be accessible to a child and would also give college professors and professional critics something, maybe something they haven’t had much of recently, or indeed ever.” This book is not so much the autobiography of a poet as it is the biography of a poet’s work. Unique and revealing, Self-Interviews is an intimate profile of a decade in the art of one of America’s finest poets.