Helmets was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1964, Dickey’s third collection and the bridge between the relatively controlled early work and the explosive moral complexity of Buckdancer’s Choice. The title poem describes the speaker drinking from an old military helmet found in a creek — a simple act that triggers a cascade of associations with war, water, death, and the strange intimacy of using an object that once protected another man’s head.
The collection shows Dickey extending his range while deepening his characteristic concerns. “Cherrylog Road” — one of his most popular poems — describes a teenage sexual encounter in an automobile junkyard, rendering the scene with a vivid physicality (the heat of the metal, the smell of rust, the weight of the girl’s body) that makes it one of the great American poems about adolescent desire. “The Scarred Girl” addresses a young woman disfigured in an automobile accident, finding in her scars a strange beauty that conventional beauty cannot match.
The dominant mode is what Dickey called “the expansive poem” — long, narrative, heavily enjambed, designed to carry the reader forward on a wave of language that mimics the momentum of physical experience. The reader of a Dickey poem does not observe from outside; he is swept along, forced to inhabit the poem’s world with the same intensity as its speaker.
Collecting Helmets
First edition (Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, 1964): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $60–$180
- Without jacket: $10–$30