Books, Arts & Manners: The Poetics of Rhetoric

The Strength of Fields By James Dickey

Doubleday, 85 pp., $6 The latest collection by James Dickey, The Strength of Fields, marks a change in the landscape of American poetry today, not only because of its often Whitmanesque individualism, but also and especially because it picks up a literary fashion that had been dormant for the past twenty years—the rhetorical stance. Aside from a few poems that are more subdued and intimate in their essence, the writer’s whole effort here goes toward building up towering successions of images by means of a visual syntax that is, on the surface, arbitrary and reckless: as a matter of fact, it is stylistically controlled to the point of artificiality, and nostalgic in an elegiac way, pointing as it does to a lost rapport with nature, childhood, ideals of sharing that we must endeavor to recover.

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Nereo E. Condini

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The Strength of Fields By James Dickey

Doubleday, 85 pp., $6 The latest collection by James Dickey, The Strength of Fields, marks a change in the landscape of American poetry today, not only because of its often Whitmanesque individualism, but also and especially because it picks up a literary fashion that had been dormant for the past twenty years—the rhetorical stance. Aside from a few poems that are more subdued and intimate in their essence, the writer’s whole effort here goes toward building up towering successions of images by means of a visual syntax that is, on the surface, arbitrary and reckless: as a matter of fact, it is stylistically controlled to the point of artificiality, and nostalgic in an elegiac way, pointing as it does to a lost rapport with nature, childhood, ideals of sharing that we must endeavor to recover.