SOURCE: Tillinghast, Richard. “James Dickey: The Whole Motion.” Southern Review 28, no. 4 (autumn 1992): 971-80.

In the following review, Tillinghast provides a laudatory overview of Dickey's poetic career.

The publication this summer of James Dickey's The Whole Motion finally makes available under one cover the poems he has published during a career that has spanned more than four decades. The extravagant imagination of the man who has given us such titles as The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy couldn't be content with something as drab as “collected poems,” though the book's subtitle identifies it as such. Dickey came of age during a cultural moment when poets' reputations were often founded as much on the excesses of their personal lives as on the quality of their work. When one surveys the lives of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, and Anne...