Drowning with Others was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1962, Dickey’s second collection and the book that brought him to national attention. The title suggests his method: Dickey’s poems characteristically involve the speaker entering another consciousness — drowning with the drowned, dying with the dead, hunting with the animals — in a process of imaginative identification that dissolves the boundary between self and other.
The collection contains several of Dickey’s most celebrated early poems. “The Lifeguard” tells the story of a man who failed to save a drowning child and who returns at night to the lake, diving again and again in search of the body, until in a visionary moment the child rises from the water — alive or imagined, Dickey never says. “The Heaven of Animals” imagines a paradise in which predators hunt and kill eternally, their prey rising again to be killed again, in a cycle of violence and resurrection that presents nature as it is rather than as human morality wishes it to be.
Dickey’s war poems — based on his service as a night-fighter pilot in the Pacific — are less well known than the nature poems but equally powerful. They explore the bomber’s paradox: the combination of terror and exhilaration, the guilt of killing from a distance, and the beauty of destruction seen from above.
Collecting Drowning with Others
First edition (Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, 1962): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $80–$250
- Without jacket: $15–$40