Buckdancer's Choice

James Dickey

Buckdancer's Choice, Dickey's fourth book, should have been the one that catapulted him into the national spotlight. (That didn't happen for another five years, when he released his first novel: Deliverance.) Buckdancer's Choice won Dickey the 1965 National Book Award for poetry, as well as getting him named consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress. But, as is usually the way with these things, in the wider world, Dickey remained just as obscure as ever for another half-decade.

There are few nits that can be picked with a book full of stuff as powerful as James Dickey's. Two of the best poems he wrote in his long and illustrious career, “The Fire-Bombing” and “The Fiend,” both found their first homes in this slim volume. Both are in the style Dickey invented, presumably nameless, which plays with line breaks by putting them in the middles of lines. (Yes, folks, I know these are called caesurae, but they're not regular, like one would find in Old English poetry; think of it more as a form of Gerard Manley Hopkins' sprung rhythm applied to free verse.) The effect is to get the reader to pause more often than normal, and thus to force the reader to emphasize images in his reflections on the poem than he otherwise normally would:

“He descends
a medium-sized shadow
while that one sleeps and
turns
In her high bed in loss
as he goes limb by limb
quietly down
The trunk with one lighted side….”
(“The Fiend”)

Coupled with these are, of course, poems written in a more “regular” style, equally as powerful, combining enchantment and revulsion. It was said in Victorian times that the mark of British gentility was to have a copy of one of Tennyson's works prominently displayed in one's home. Were America to value poetry that much, there is little doubt Buckdancer's Choice would be on the short list of books that would mark American gentility in a similar way, or at least a certain type of American gentility. Some of the best American poetry written since (or, perhaps, since long before) World War II.