Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Patricia Laurence

Critical Essay by Patricia Laurence

SOURCE: Laurence, Patricia. “James Dickey's Puella in Flight.” South Carolina Review 26, no. 2 (spring 1994): 61-71.

In the following essay, Laurence analyzes the volume Puella, emphasizing a movement toward the aesthetic “possession” of its female subject and a balancing stylistic quality of “lightness” in the poems.

James Dickey's collection of poems, Puella, begins with the dedication, “To Deborah—her girlhood, male-imagined.” The nineteen difficult poems published in only one edition by Doubleday in 1982, and a small private printing by Pyracantha Press in 1985, limn a poet's changing imaginings of his young wife as a girl coming of age. The poems illumine Dickey's epigraph:

I lived in thee, and dreamed, and waked Twice what I had been.

T. Sturge Moore

Coming to these poems from the masculine wilds of Dickey's novel, Deliverance, the work that looms largest in the American imagination, we veer in this collection into another kind...
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