SOURCE: "A Walk on the Dark Side," in Chicago Tribune, September 19, 1993, p. 5.

[In the following review, Johnson asserts that Dickey's To the White Sea "is less ambitious and in some ways less accomplished than his previous novels."]

Only a handful of writers have managed to excel at both poetry and the novel. The fiction of major poets—Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, for example—is often simply an autobiographical coda to their collected poems; and while such tireless novelists as John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates write an abundant quantity of poetry as well, the results are decidedly minor, at least when compared to their most important achievements in fiction.

Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence and Robert Penn Warren are among the select group of writers who have produced, in both forms, undeniably first-rate work, and to this short list many critics would add the name of James...