SOURCE: "Mumbling and Clanging," in Times Literary Supplement, May 10, 1991, p. 22.

[In the following excerpt, Mackinnon condemns Dickey's The Eagle's Mile as "a clanging, overweening collection."]

[I]n the title poem, "The Eagle's Mile", in memory of Justice William Douglas, theoretically welcome as a public elegy and especially as one about such a man, Dickey invites the addressee to reappear in landscape and "power-hang in it all now, for all / The whole thing is worth: catch without warning / Somewhere in the North Georgia creek like ghostmuscle tensing / Forever, or on the high grass bed / Yellow of dawn, catch like a man stamp-printed by God- / shock, blue as the very foot / Of fire." All the words work like pistons in a museum engine, flailing, rhetorical and futile.

A quieter poem like "The Olympian", in which Dickey races "the Olympian, / Now my oldest boy's junior / High school algebra teacher" round his...