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- The Eagle’s Mile
Poems that marked a new direction for a master poet
A book of new poems by a major writer is an event. A book of new poems that marks a different, more powerful approach is cause for celebration. "What I looked for here," James Dickey tells us about The Eagle's Mile, "was a flicker of light 'from another direction,' and when I caught it – or thought I did – I followed where it went, for better or worse." In this new work, Dickey edges away from the narrative-based poems of his previous books and gives instead more primacy to the language in which he writes. His poetry gains flexibility, and his poetic power becomes even surer and more clearly expressed. "I have experimented," Dickey writes, "and look forward to experimenting more."
JAMES DICKEY, born in Atlanta in 1923, is most widely known as the author of the novel and screenplay Deliverance. He is also the author of several other novels and fifteen books of poetry. His many honors include the National Book Award and a Melville Cane Award for Buckdancer's Choice (1965). He was invited to read at President Carter's inauguration in 1977, and most recently served as Judge of the prestigious Yale Younger Poets series. He died in 1997 in South Carolina.
"This is breathless breath-taking torrential poetry in the high metaphysical style."
~Karl Shapiro
"Dickey is no ruminator or meditator. Perception with him is not a static matter. It is characteristically, whatever his subject, a clash, a confrontation, something that might happen in a cyclotron; and the particles that are struck off are new and packed with primal energy, particles of order destroyed during the act of creation . . . What I am left with is an awed sense of the pure power of these words."
~Wallace Stegner
"James Dickey is the high flier of contemporary American poets. In The Eagle's Mile he is flying higher than ever, so high the earth is reduced to its elements, its essential radiance"
~John Updike