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- The Whole Motion
Documentation of the development of a major literary figure.
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from his first book, Into the Stone (1960), to The Eagle's Mile (1990), along with previously uncollected poems and unpublished "apprentice" works.
JAMES DICKEY is Carolina Professor and Poet-in-Residence at University of South Carolina. His many honors include a Guggenheim, a National Book Award and a Melville Cane Award for Buckdancer's Choice (1965), and the French Prix Médicis for his novel Deliverance (1970). His most recent book is a novel, To the White Sea (1993).
"There is a physicality and a willfulness, a biblical sweep and grandness to Dickey's poetry whether he's writing about dust or combat, trees or animals, love or seasons . . . A definitive retrospective."
~Booklist
"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
"A career-spanning collection by National Book Award winner James Dickey, 'the high flier of American poets.'""
~John Updike
""There is a physicality and a willfulness, a biblical sweep and grandness to Dickey's poetry whether he's writing about dust or combat, trees or animals, love or seasons . . . A definitive retrospective.""
~Booklist
""One of the things we should mean when we call a poet 'good' is that his work returns us to the world and not merely to the poet. We do not assimilate good poetry; we become included in its imagination. James Dickey is a good poet, very good.""
~Michael Goldman, The Nation