SOURCE: Christensen, Paul. “Toward the Abyss: James Dickey at Middle Age.” Parnassus 13 (spring-summer 1986): 202-19.

In the following essay, Christensen contends that the problem with The Central Motion: Poems, 1968-1979 is that Dickey “has tried to deal with middle age, his own, and fails to perceive in it value or meaning.”

“The secret is that on whiteness you can release The blackness …” 

—The Zodiac

The psychological geography of America is familiar by now: the East and West form a significant polarity in culture—the one old and resolute, fixed by time; the other fluid and novel, sending back its innovations which ruffle and reconstitute American identity. East and West make up a sort of tectonic plate of crumbling and emerging reality. The Midwest is that drab emptiness no one can fill except with a certain malevolence of humor: it is the only place in America that never tempered its...