Buckdancer’s Choice was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1965 and won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1966, establishing Dickey as a major figure in American letters. The collection is darker and more morally complex than his earlier work, grappling directly with guilt — particularly the guilt of a man who has killed in wartime and cannot fully repent of the exhilaration he felt.
“The Firebombing” is the collection’s centerpiece: a long poem in which a former pilot remembers the incendiary raids he flew over Japan twenty years earlier. He tries to feel guilty — he burned civilians alive — but he cannot; the memory of flight, of power, of the beauty of fire seen from above overwhelms any moral response. The poem does not excuse this failure of conscience; it simply records it with devastating honesty, leaving the reader to confront the same moral vacuum.
“Slave Quarters” imagines a white Southern man entering the slave quarters of an antebellum plantation and fathering a child — an exploration of the sexual violence that underpinned slavery, told without the comfortable distance of historical condemnation. The title poem, “Buckdancer’s Choice,” portrays the poet’s dying mother remembering a Black dancer she saw in her youth — a memory of grace that sustains her through the physical degradation of death.
Collecting Buckdancer’s Choice
First edition (Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, 1965): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $60–$200
- Without jacket: $15–$35
- National Book Award adds modest premium