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Hours of the Cardinal
I lost my mother recently & I remembered reading this book many years ago & decided to read it again. Moving & beautiful both times but more so after knowing such loss myself. James Dickey is one of my favorite U.S. poets. ... Read more

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This book provides both an insightful, lucid essay, and a complete bibliography with helpful annotations.The work is an excellent resource for anyone interested in learning more about James Dickey. ... Read more

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"Struggling for Wings" is a diverse collection of reviews, interviews, and essays on the controversial career of James Dickey, a writer whose work has engendered commentary ranging from high praise to scathing personal attack. Never before collected, the materials in this volume record America's critical response to Dickey, beginning in the early 1960s when he first began publishing poetry and continuing through the mid-1990s, with comprehensive overviews of Dickey's entire canon. ... Read more

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A collection of nine critical essays on the work of James Dickey, arranged in chronological order of original publication. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Absolutely gorgeous and evocative!
I saw this for sale on the shelf of a local thrift store; I couldn't believe my luck in finding it before anyone else did!What a big, beautiful book.
James Dickey's evocative text accompanies Hubert Shuptrine's elegant, understated drybrush watercolors.There's even an unbound print that comes with the book, suitable for framing.
I was familiar with Dickey; he's the author of the (in)famous short story "Deliverance," made into a rather harrowing movie a few years back.Shuptrine, however, was new to me.There's not much about him even on Wikipedia, although there is an entry for Hubert's son, Alan Shuptrine, who like his father, is an artist.I did find out, however, that Hubert and James Dickey together were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for this magnificent volume.Of his father Hubert Shuptrine, Alan, his son, wrote:"He didn't just paint what he saw, but what he saw within...and what a difference! His words could form a painting--his paintings could speak the words. He was more than an artist, more than a chronicler of the dying South--he was a minister to us all, through his art. We need only to study one of his paintings or turn the pages of his books to feel his religious experience."

If you live in the American South, or have ties to it, this book will speak to your heart.I cannot recommend it highly enough, although it's getting hard to come by, and more expensive as time passes.Should you chance upon a copy, buy it!You'll treasure this volume for years to come.

Awesome book!
Love this book...even came w/ a bonus loose print suitable for framing. I had never heard of this artist until recently and just love his work. The book arrived in good time, in good shape. Thank you.
A. Hutchinson

Beautiful and skillful watercolor using Drybrush technique
Meticulous detailed dry brush watercolors.Reminiscense of the South as it was not too many years ago.Hard working and sincere people depicted with love and compassion.

Beautiful book
This is a lovely book, the illustrations are magnificent. On a recent trip to the USA, I browsed through a copy and it gave me a real feeling of the South...I am trying to find a brand new copy for myself, but it has gone out of print. ... Read more

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William B. Thesing, James Dickey's colleague at the University of South Carolina for twenty years, has a unique and complex perspective on the life and writing of this great twentieth-century American author. Dickey offers readers, students, and teachers a variety of energized and imaginative texts, and Thesing provides original and perceptive readings of his life and his novels as well as his most popular poems about animals in nature, man in nature, social and sexual relationships, women, and civilian and wartime death.

This is the only introductory teaching/study guide available on Dickey's poems and novels. Chapters are conveniently organized around essential thematic categories. The author employs various modern critical approaches&8212;from feminist criticism to deconstruction&8212;to the poems and novels. The book will be useful in college or high school courses on Southern literature, American poetry, and twentieth-century literature. ... Read more

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James Dickey was a great poet, a legend of the reading circuit, and -- after the best-selling Deliverance and its celebrated movie version -- a celebrity. This rich collection, reaching from 1943 tohis death in 1997, and from a fledgling poet to an ailing man of letters, constitutes a vibrant short course in literature and poetry since World War II. From a 1959 letter: "For a long time I have been trying to do two things in poetry, both of which I have been told I should not do. The first is to get away, by whatever means, from the idea of a poem as objet d'art. . . . The other is to be able to make statements, one after the other: this happens, this happens, then this happens. To go with all this, I have also been trying to assert connections in nature where none exist: to make the world do what I say, rather than what it actually does." Matthew J. Bruccoli, James Dickey's literary personal representative, notes in his introduction: "The letters assembled in this volume represent perhaps twenty percent of James Dickey's located correspondence. The double rationale for selection was first to document the growth of a major writer -- how a scarcely educated jock discovered that he possessed genius and that writing was the only thing that counted -- then, second, to document the ways he fulfilled his genius and advanced his career. . . . The best letters here are the ones about writing . . . his correspondence documents the accuracy of his critical judgments." Dickey's correspondents include John Berryman, Harold Bloom, Philip Booth, Richard Howard, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Donald Hall, James Merrill, Ezra Pound, Anne Sexton, Mark Strand, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, and James Wright. Entertaining and erudite, these letters reveal the fierce, complicated literary intellect of the man John Updike called "the high-flyer of American poets." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Personal Snippets of a Great Poet
First off, a disclaimer: I knew Dickey personally toward the end of his life.I met him once (in 1991) and talked to him on the phone every now and again after that.He was out of sorts much of the time, and not much of a conversationalist.But occassionally he would be on the upswing and revert to his old self.He loved the title of my first, unpublished novel, Seamarks, and used to always tell me "I'm on yo' side son!"-So, I suppose all this biases me, though I'm not sure in which direction, because I haven't sorted out my feelings toward this great man of letters, old enough to be my father or grandfather, who encouraged my efforts as a literary artist during the past decade.I truly don't like that this book was published, as is, so soon after his death.It doesn't take the shrewdest person in the world to figure out that the editors were trying to capitalize on his death while he was still fresh in the ground.I don't know how they selected which letters to publish.But I don't like whatever methods they employed.The letters just don't cohere like they should.-It seems to me, truth be told, that there wasn't much method or forethought; more a rush to publish what looked passable as a chronological sequence of some of his correspondence.-Such is the posthumous fate of a great artist.I made it a point to get to know Dickey because I thought, and still think, him to be the last truly geat poet alive.It just happened that he lived in Columbia, a two hour drive from my native Greenville.-Dickey was the last poet that I know of in the tradition of the visionaries of the early 19th Century.Though he would deny this at times, his son's memoir has him comparing himself to Shelley just before his death.-Also, the great English writer Malcolm Lowry had a TREMENDOUS influence on him, as the letter recounting Dickey's visit to his grave shows.Dickey was always recommending Lowry's works to me (particularly Lunar Caustic, an out-of-print autobiographical work regarding Lowry's stay in New York's Bellevue psychiatric hospital for alcoholism treatment.) - I'd already discovered Lowry years ago and read just about every word written by him three times over. - Chris Dickey may or may not know this, but those lines his father quotes from Goethe at the end of the book (attributing them to his mother) are from one of the three opening quotations to Lowry's masterpiece, Under the Volcano.The point of all this emphasis on Dickey's debt to Lowry is that Lowry was one of the last in the same tradition.I'm just making my case. I think the earliest letters in this selection the best.I got a particular thrill of how taken he was with the now forgotten English poet Ernest Dowson.I was mentioning poets I liked when I met him in '91 (He was not in a particularly good mood, by the way.)and he kept stoliidly shaking his head and saying "never heard of him."But when I mentioned Dowson, he perked up, and a twinkle glimmered briefly in his eyes.Dowson drank himself to death in his early thirties, the victim of unrequited love, among other things...What Dowson, Lowry, Shelley and Dickey all have in common is that they viewed their roles as writers as seers, visionaries and prophets who, through their work, brought what others could not feel or see into the written word, and thus into the worlds of others less gifted....This is Dickey at his best, and this is why his letters are worth reading, to understand how such a person recognizes such a gift and evolves into a human being capable of expressing unparalleled beauty and unworldliness.I would, however, recommend that the reader wait upon a more comprehensive, less higgeldy-piggeldy collection of his letters.In the meantime, this one will have to do of course.Dickey could also be a monstrous jerk, as those of you who've read Hart's bio, The World as a Lie, know all too well.Hart did a great job, by the way, and I don't have the same reservations about his bio as I do about the publication of these letters.But buy this book anyway and read it.There aren't any poets like Dickey around anymore, and such a man's letters are worth reading...Although, who knows, maybe there are some left in this sound bite world of Oprah Winfrey show poetry.If you find one let me know, it will be like catching a falling star...My apologies to John Donne.

A superbly written and candidly presented autobiography.
Matthew Bruccoli and Judith Baughman edit Crux: The Letters Of James Dickey, an excellent autobiography which provides a rich collection of works from 1943-1997. Dickey's extensive letters to literary correspondentsfrom John Berryman to Ezra Pound and Anne Sexton are gathered together in apresentation recommended for any with an interest in Dickey's varied works. ... Read more

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The Way We Read James Dickey
As the editor of two collections of essays on James Dickey and The Selected Poems of James Dickey, I am especially pleased to see the appearance of this new collection (2009) on one of our foremost American writers.Thesing and Wrede have done an outstanding job of assembling original assessments on Dickey's poetry, prose, and place in Southern literature. All the essays are strong.The Introduction provides a comprehensive overview on Dickey criticism.My favorite piece is novelist and former Dickey student Pat Conroy's attack on "political correctness" which has been used in academic circles to dismiss Dickey.Conroy's affection for Dickey's work is honest and admirable, and this collection in its quality and breadth extends the integrity of serious commentary on Dickey, if postmodern readers are careful and industrious enough to give this book the attention it deserves.
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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 archery and guitar playing. Dickey can be blunt in his opinions, as when he states that "a second-rate writer like Norman Mailer will sit around wondering what on earth it is that Hemingway had that Mailer might possibly be able to get." But the journal also reveals a great capacity for sympathy, as when Dickey tells of his father's long illness, and a revealing candor--"I am Lewis," he writes of his novel Deliverance, "every word is true."

The journal is at its most revealing, however, when Dickey discusses the craft of poetry. "It is good for a poet to remember," he writes, "that the human mind, though in some ways very complicated, is in some others very simple." This awareness that poetry must understand the simplicities of human existence is a recurring concern for Dickey, and he writes with disdain of the "brilliant things" that too often clog poetry, the stale self-absorption that warps the perceptions of many poets. In the essays that make up the second part of the book, Dickey also focuses on poetry, exploring the relation of the poet to his works, the promise of a younger generation of poets, and the place of Theodore Roethke as the greatest American poet.

Wide-ranging and acute, "Sorties" opens up for the reader the discriminating mind that lies behind some of the most accomplished and memorable poetry written in America in this century. ... Read more

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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 transcription 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 great effect in his teaching. They also contribute to the unraveling of Dickey's art from the larger-than-life myth that surrounded him.

In a comprehensive introduction to Dickey's remarks, Donald J. Greiner evaluates the relevance of the writer's often sharply worded opinions. The volume brings to life class sessions planned and delivered soon after Dickey took up full-time residence at the University of South Carolina, in the triumphal years following his rapid succession of honors. Full of asides, witticisms, and afterthoughts, the sessions suggest not the pontification of a scholar at an academic conference but the confident learning of a practicing poet who happens to enjoy being in the classroom. Clearly setting forth his sense of literary criticism, Dickey repeatedly emphasizes the preeminence of the poet over the critic, the original use of language as a primary criterion for effective poetry, and the centrality of personal reaction to poetry as a measure of its value. Dickey's comments are valuable for their insight into both his own thought processes and those of the poets he reviewed, among them William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, A. E. Housman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare, and Robert Bridges. ... Read more

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soso popo
as a collection of class lecture notes this book has a right to bo verbose and disjointed,but it shouldn't make such abusive use of its rights. ... Read more

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A child hunts the animals of the world with a pop gun and the snare of his imagination. ... Read more