Poems 1957–1967 was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1967 (and simultaneously by a trade edition from Collier Books), collecting the work from Dickey’s first four volumes: Into the Stone (1960), Drowning with Others (1962), Helmets (1964), and Buckdancer’s Choice (1965). Together they present one of the most remarkable debuts in postwar American poetry.
Dickey’s characteristic mode is the long-lined, heavily enjambed narrative poem that plunges the reader into extreme physical experience: a man hunting deer at night, a pilot in a burning aircraft, a sleepwalker on a neighbor’s roof, a lifeguard searching for a drowned child. The poems are intensely physical — they make the reader feel the weight of bodies, the temperature of water, the texture of bark and earth — and they are drawn to moments of transformation: the instant when the hunter becomes the hunted, when the living become the dead, when the human enters the animal.
The major poems in the collection — “The Heaven of Animals,” “Falling,” “The Firebombing,” “Cherrylog Road,” “The Sheep Child,” “Adultery” — are among the most anthologized American poems of the 1960s. “Falling” (the story of an airline stewardess who falls from a plane and experiences a kind of ecstasy as she plummets toward death) and “The Firebombing” (a former WWII pilot remembering the incendiary raids on Japan) are particularly powerful examples of Dickey’s ability to inhabit extreme experience through language.
Collecting Poems 1957–1967
First edition (Wesleyan University Press, 1967): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$100
- Without jacket: $10–$25
- Signed copies: $60–$150