In what he calls a "snapshot" of James Dickey in The Writer's Voice (1973), George Garrett has written, "Legends, myths, fables and fabliaux, anecdotes, quotations from, hard and funny sayings, true and false, wheel and flock about him, a shrill invisible halo of birds explosively circling the edges of his wide-brimmed Warner Brothers sheriff's hat, the one he probably sleeps in (they say). No, not once upon a time an ad man for nothing at all ...." All the talk and writing about Dickey's being "The Unlikeliest Poet," as Life magazine dubbed him in 1966, all the good-ol'-boy carousing, the reminiscences of football, track, and World-War-II-and-Korea fighter-pilot adrenalin, all the hoopla of his public appearances and the grand roaring splash of Deliverance (1970, 1973)--book and movie--cannot obscure the accomplishment of this looming man poet. In "Under Buzzards," Dickey's speaker, facing a terrible diminution because of diabetes and proscriptions about drinking, explains with...