Talvikki Ansel's My Shining Archipelago is the winner of the 1996 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Her book gives us a front-row seat in a true Amazon theater where, says James Dickey in his foreword, --Ansel finds her way of bringing into language the hellish magnificence, the perverse pluralism-more, always more, in the Amazon basin.-- This cycle of --freewheeling sonnets-- (Part II of the book) is cradled between sections of ambitious lyrics that recall Dutch still lifes in their intense scrutiny of pears, eels, gutted birds, to get at their essence. The book closes with a second...

James Dickey's creativity as a poet is well known. But there have been few opportunities for his readers to become familiar with the full dimensions of his mind, with the thoughts and perceptions that lie just outside the matter of his poetry.

"Sorties" brings together the contents of a journal kept by Dickey for several years and six discerning essays on poetry and the creative process. The journal follows Dickey's mind as it alights on a wide array of topics, ranging from the work of his colleagues to the plotting of a new novel, from the onset of old age to pride over accomplishments in...

Winner of the National Book Award (1966)
Winner of the Melville Cane Award (1966)

Whoever looks to a new book by James Dickeys for further work in an established mode, or for mere novelty, is going to be disappointed. But those who seek instead a true widening of the horizons of meaning, coupled with a sure-handed mastery of the craft of poetry, will find this latest collection satisfying indeed.

Here is a man who matches superb gifts with a truly subtle imagination, into whose depths he is courageously traveling--pioneering--in exploratory penetrations into areas of...

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...

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.

The first book to collect James Dickey's very best poems, this volume brings together the finest work from each of the periods in Dickey's extremely controversial career. For over three decades, until his death in 1997, Dickey was one of the nation's most important poets; these are the poems that brought him a popular readership and critical acclaim.

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...

Widely known as the winner of the 1966 National Book Award and author of the best-selling novel Deliverance, James Dickey devoted himself as much to the critique of the modern literary tradition as to his participation in it. A writer enthralled by teaching, he lectured at several major universities before settling at the University of South Carolina for nearly three decades as poet-in-residence. After his death in 1997, a transcript of his lectures was found among his papers. Collected here and published for the first time, these lectures reveal judgments and appraisals Dickey would use to...

Nicholas Samaras's Hands of the Saddlemaker, the winning volume in the 1991 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, was selected from among 710 entries in this annual competition. The broad theme of Samaras's poems is the connection between eternal things and the passing world, between our sense of exile and our sense of commonality. Equilibrium between these worlds is achieved only through human feeling, through language. Samaras examines the commonality of experience in diverse international settings--from Byzantium to the cathedrals of technology in the modern cities of America....